Healthy People 2020: Progress on LGBT Health

For more than three decades, the Healthy People initiative has provided a comprehensive set of national 10-year health promotion and disease prevention objectives aimed at improving the health of all Americans.  The latest iteration, Healthy People 2020 (HP2020), introduced Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Health as one of the 42 topic areas for this decade. Developing nationally representative objectives for LGBT Health for the HP2020 initiative is a complex process. The strategy of Healthy People is to develop objectives that reflect important public health concerns and generally include targets for the nation to work towards. Through the development of topic area webpages, evidence-based resources, webinars, and multiple opportunities for stakeholder and community involvement, HP2020 provides a spotlight on progress toward meeting objective targets and the elimination of health disparities. Healthy People includes opportunities to show data by sexual orientation and gender identity for population level objectives in other topic areas, as well as specific objectives housed in the LGBT Health topic area, for measuring the health of sexual and gender minority populations across national health surveys, with the ultimate goal of being able to show nationally representative data for these populations. This presentation will address the early development of objectives for the topic area, and then primarily concentrate on the progress of developing an approach focused on inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity questions in HP2020 data sources and surveys.