Abstract

You may struggle to find anyone who would disagree with the notion that equity is a fundamental component of value in health and healthcare. However, ask people to define exactly what fairness means and how we might operationalize it in research to support our health systems, and you may equally struggle. Although economic evaluation is widely used to support resource allocation in health, work continues to develop methods and applications of equity-informative evaluation. The articles in this Value in Health themed section illustrate a range of methodological issues and novel approaches being developed to facilitate the application of distributional analysis for economic evaluation. They include articles that propose novel means of reporting results of equity-informative information with the aim to mobilize this research into action, articles that address the challenge of measuring preferences for health inequality aversion, and articles that demonstrate how the various additional informational requirements can be addressed.