Health Inequalities

Week 5 Discussion – Health Inequalities
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This special topic focuses on inequalities in health and more general notions of social justice. Healthcare is intertwined with economic opportunity, personal freedom, and other core determinants of a quality life. Health inequalities are studied within and across many nations. Of course, right now these issues are of acute interest in the U.S. as the healthcare sector is affected by the Affordable Healthcare Act. Health outcomes and access to care are important factors affecting the satisfaction of our citizenry, independent of any political affiliation.

Our prior work here at USF in healthcare data warehousing included some work on measuring health inequalities. So, a bit of that work is presented here. In addition, some current and more general readings provide an overview of the issues. Database systems have a lot to offer here with respect to creating integrated data collections and implementing reasonable measures of health inequalities. To make any progress requires the ability to monitor and measure existing inequalities. This is a complex undertaking and database technologies are part of the necessary infrastructure.

Readings

The main reading for this special topic is the Bleich et al. (Annual Review of Public Health 2012) article “Health Inequalities: Trends, Progress, and Policy”: Bleich_ARPH2012Inequalities.pdf download. This is a fairly long paper, so focus on the more general findings and any sections of interest to you.

Further Readings (Optional)

This additional reading gives some background on USF-based research in healthcare data warehousing that considers measuring and visualizing health inequalities using techniques like the Gini index: Berndt_HICSS2003Gini.pdf download.

This is another good background reading that focuses on how to measure health inequalities: Costa-Font_HP2012Inequalities.pdf download.