PURPOSE: To define health equity and discuss and practice methods for measurement.

DESCRIPTION: Recently health equity has become a high priority for healthcare delivery systems across the U.S., especially as the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed long-standing inequities among racially, socially, and economically minoritized and marginalized populations. However, we struggle as a society to solve these issues, in part, because we lack appropriate methods to quantify the inequities and identify drivers – both necessary for the development of viable solutions and the monitoring of impact.

Understanding health outcomes in these underserved population sub-groups requires innovative analytics and dynamic application of health and population data. Use of proxy indicators, such as quality of life and mortality, to measure health disparities has been limited and rarely implemented at a population-level. The members of this panel designed, developed, and implemented a Health Equity Index (HEI) and a COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Index (CVEI), using analytic methods intended to enable healthcare systems to identify and prioritize the remediation of health disparities.

These two metrics are somewhat atypically designed to compare a subgroup to the ideal version of itself, rather than comparing it to a reference subgroup which often represents a majority (e.g. non-Hispanic White individuals). Because of this nuance, we are able to capture equity issues in an intersection of multiple types of subgroups such as low income, uninsured, housing insecure, etc... It is our hope that these tools will be adapted for other conditions and used by any institution striving to address health inequities.

In this workshop, we will share our measurement methodology in several topic areas, and we will distribute a (simulated) dataset to provide hands on experience in using our measurement approaches. In sharing this work, we hope to begin to address the pressing need for methods to identify and quantify health inequities.