A Primer on Health Equity Research

According to the World Health Organization, “Three distinguishing features, when combined, turn mere variations or differences in health into a social inequity in health. They are systematic, socially produced (and therefore modifiable) and unfair. That is how an ISPOR Special Interest Group Report by Griffiths et al. (2025) begins. The health equity primer provides and…

The new OMB Social Welfare Function

Recently, the Office of Management and Budget has released new procedures to assess government regulation (Circular A-4) and economic policies (Circular A-94). What is unique about this guidance is that it weights benefits and costs of new regulations and policies based on the income of the individuals impacted. The goal is to help reduce inequality.…

Health and wealth

Are wealthier people healthier? If so, how strong is this relationship? Does it vary across countries? That is what a paper by Kyriopoulos et al. 2024 aims to answer. They measure health and wealth using a “concentration index” (CI) which is calculated as follows: CI is estimated with reference to the concentration curve, which illustrates…

Impact of physician gender on disability evaluations

Interesting paper by Cabral and Dillender (2024). The randomization of gender assignment occurs since the Texas workers compensation insurance relies on random assignment of doctors to patients through their dispute resolution process. The abstract is below: Little is known about what drives gender disparities in health care and related social insurance benefits. Using data and…

Quantifying The Value of Reduced Health Disparities: Low-Dose CT Lung Cancer Screening of High-Risk Individuals within the US

That is the title of a paper currently published (well, in pre-prints) at Value in Health. Co-authors include Jaehong Kim, Moises Marin MA, Sangeetha Ramsagar, Mark Lloyd Davies, Kyana Stewart, Iftekhar Kalsekar and Anil Vachani. The abstract is below: ObjectiveTo measure the value of increasing lung cancer screening rates for high-risk individuals and its impact…

Recommendations for incorporating equity into HTA evaluation

Many health policy experts–including myself–have noted that treatments that help reduce health disparities may be especially valuable whereas those that exacerbate inequalities may be somewhat less valuable than predicted by standard cost-effectiveness analysis. A key question is, health disparities over what dimension(s)? Is it race? Income? Education? O’Nell et al. (2013) developed the PROGRESS framework.…

How do social determinants of health impact health outcomes?

There are many studies that show that social determinants of health (SDOH) impact health outcomes. A more challenging question is how do SDOH impact health outcomes? Specifically, through what pathways or mechanisms do SDOH operate? A paper by Thimm-Kaiser (2023) identifies 8 mechanisms through which SDOH impact outcomes. These include: SDOH are underlying causes of…