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…

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…

Social Vulnerability Metric: An improved SDoH measure?

A paper by Saulsberry et al. (2023) argues that the Social Vulnerability Metric (SVM) is an improvement over previous social determinants of health (SDOH) measures such as the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). SVI uses census tract level data to construct overall community rankings based on variables included in four themes: “Socioeconomic Status” including percentages below…

Excess mortality among Black Americans

A paper by Caraballo et al. (2023) published today uses CDC data to measure excess mortality among Black Americans between 1999-2020. They find that: From 1999 to 2011, the age-adjusted excess mortality rate declined from 404 to 211 excess deaths per 100 000 individuals among Black males (P for trend <.001). However, the rate plateaued from…

What is HIDI?

ICER recently released a white paper titled “Advancing Health Technology Assessment Methods that Support Health Equity“. In addition to discussing a variety of methods–e.g., distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA), extended cost effectiveness analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)–for quantifying the value of new treatments in terms of their ability to reduce health disparities, ICER also introduces the…

What is the Yost Index?

The Yost Index is a measure of socioeconomic status (SES) across geographic areas. The index was developed by Kathleen Yost and coauthors in their 2001 paper titled “Socioeconomic status and breast cancer incidence in California for different race/ethnic groups.” There are seven key inputs to creating the Yost index were calculated at the Census block…

Challenges in implementing DCEA

In recent years, policymakers and payers have been focused increasingly not only on how new health technologies improve overall health, but also whether they can reduce health disparities. Oftentimes, however, discussions around health disparities are conducted on a qualitative basis with litlted quantitative analysis of tradeoffs between equity and effectiveness. Distributional cost effectiveness analysis (DCEA)…