Report Publish Date: January 1, 2024

This brief by Partners for Advancing Health Equity describes foundational concepts on how to define health equity and measure whether it has been achieved. It summarizes key learnings from a three-workshop sprint on measuring health equity.

Primary Takeaways

To measure health equity and know when we’ve achieved it, we need to first define it in a way that is measurable.

The authors say a health equity measure must have three basic components: an indicator of health or of a determinant of health, a way of categorizing groups, and a way of comparing the health indicator across the groups.

Overview and Objectives

In the three-part workshop, participants learned about and discussed the ways we currently define and measure health equity. They discussed how useful those definitions and measurements are. 

Hypothesis or Approach 

The authors say common definitions of health equity, such as a “state in which everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health,” are hard to measure because people don’t always agree on what the concepts included mean. They describe discussions among participants at the workshop series about how we can better define and measure health equity. 

How This Influences Change

Better understanding how to measure health equity can help us make sure interventions to achieve it are working.