New Guide Promotes Accessible Healthcare for People with Disabilities

For the estimated 27 percent of U.S. adults with a disability, research suggests that gaps in the quality of care they receive make them more likely to experience medical errors and adverse medical events. A comprehensive new guide, Accessible Healthcare for People with Disabilities – An Implementation Guide for Healthcare Organizations, aims to reduce those gaps by helping organizations implement, monitor, and evaluate disability accessibility programs.

NYU Langone Health researchers, including Megan A. Morris, PhD, MPH, an expert on healthcare disparities linked to disabilities, led development of the guide. Driving its publication, Dr. Morris says, are new “bare minimum” federal requirements for providing accessible care, such as having accessible medical diagnostic equipment.

The guide focuses on how to integrate accessibility within a healthcare organization’s culture. “Yes, we want to help healthcare centers meet these federal requirements,” Dr. Morris says. “But it’s really about taking it to the next level to make sure that patients with disabilities are receiving equitable care.”

Published in April 2026 by the Disability Equity Collaborative (DEC), which Dr. Morris directs and helped launch in 2018, the guide initially featured four chapters, outlining key early steps for improving disability accessibility, highlighted below. Two additional chapters covering accessible medical diagnostic equipment and physical spaces were released in October 2026, with more chapters to come.

Also in October 2026, DEC partnered with NYU Langone’s Rusk Rehabilitation and Institute for Excellence in Health Equity to host a two-day workshop on how other organizations can put disability access into practice.

1) Setting Up an Accessibility Program

• When establishing an accessibility program, Dr. Morris says, it’s critical that healthcare organizations engage with people with disabilities and incorporate their experiences and perspectives. “We really try to uphold that saying in the disability rights movement: ‘Nothing about us without us,’” she says.

• Organizations must think broadly about which departments should be involved in implementing accessibility programs. At NYU Langone, program participants include not only patient experience and interpreter services but also the Real Estate Development and Facilities Department. “Thinking about disability accessibility really touches every part of your institution,” Dr. Morris says.

• The guide includes a slide deck template for a presentation to organization leaders about the value of an accessibility program, along with an example list of leaders to consult.

2) Documenting Disability Status

• For state and federal-mandated documentation of patients’ disability status, considerations include where in the electronic health record (EHR) the documentation should reside, who can access that information, and how to ask patients about their status and ensure that it’s recorded.

• The guide provides sample scripts and question prompts to help with this documentation process.

• Dr. Morris recommends asking patients about their disability status while they’re still outpatients. “We need to ask early,” she says. When they later arrive to the hospital, necessary accommodations can be ready, such as having height-adjustable exam tables for patients who use wheelchairs.

3) Providing Disability Accommodations

• The guide lists numerous examples of disability accommodations, which include any policy, procedure, object, or activity that needs to be modified so patients can access care. If a patient has a service animal, for instance, Dr. Morris says organizations need policies around the animal’s entry and handling during visits.

• An accessibility screening tool template can help identify needed accommodations, which can also include hearing amplification devices for patients with hearing loss or assistance with paperwork for patients with visual disabilities.

• An accommodation may also involve adjusting a room’s environment or even a clinician’s communication style. “If someone has a cognitive disability, you may need to speak in shorter phrases or sentences so that they can understand,” Dr. Morris says.

4) Effective Communication

• The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act requires healthcare organizations to ensure that communications with people with disabilities is just as effective as communications with people without disabilities. For patients with hearing disabilities, for instance, that may mean providing an accommodation such as an ASL interpreter or sharing verbal instructions in writing.

• The guide provides multiple examples and resources for effective communication in written materials, including both print and electronic forms. “For example, we need to make sure that the EHR, the patient portal, or any material we’re sending to the patient in electronic form, like a PDF, is accessible and can be read by a screen reader for people with visual disabilities,” Dr. Morris says.

Members of the DEC have offered other examples of how healthcare organizations can become more accessible, Dr. Morris notes. As one example, she is collaborating with NYU Langone’s healthcare quality leadership to further incorporate disability accommodations into quality initiatives.

“I’m excited to see how we can use our existing infrastructure around quality monitoring and improvement and include people with disabilities, publish our findings, and be an example and a model for other healthcare organizations,” she says.