Health Equity is widely proclaimed to be an important goal of public health policy and practice. Yet while there is an emerging consensus on what health equity means, the measurement of health equity is fractious, with no one measure emerging as a satisfactory empirical correlate of the central definition. Often, health equity is proxied by health disparities, which are a distinct concept. Improving health equity requires accountability to a strong empirical measure of health equity, because comparisons across time and place are essential to finding effective policies for improving health equity.
This project has developed such a measure and is applying it to track performance of states and localities on health equity.
This project has developed such a measure and is applying it to track performance of states and localities on health equity.
This work has been published here:
A Robust Health Equity Metric. Public Health. 2019.
Frederick J. Zimmerman.
Trends in Health Equity in the United States by Race/Ethnicity, Sex and Income, 1993-2017. Jama Network Open. 2019.
Frederick J. Zimmerman and Nathaniel Anderson.
The project also tests the policy drivers of health equity, particularly in the social determinants of health, such as wage policy, school policy, urban planning, and transportation.
This work has been published here:
Neighborhood-level Commute Time and Residential Crowding Predict Vulnerability in Early Child Development in the US. American Journal of Public Health. 2018.
Eryn Piper Block, Frederick J. Zimmerman, Efren Aguilar, Lisa Stanley, Neal Halfon.
"Examining the association of changes in minimum wage with health across race/ethnicity and gender in the United States." BMC public health 19.1. 2019.
Narain, Kimberly Danae Cauley, and Frederick J. Zimmerman.
The Opportunity Cost of Pharmaceutical Price Increases: Improving Health by Investing in Secondary Education Critical Public Health. 2018.
Jonathan E. Fielding, Kristin Calsada, Frederick J. Zimmerman.
The impact of gun violence restraining order laws in the US and firearm suicide among older adults: a longitudinal state-level analysis, 2012–2016. BMC Public Health. 2020.
Saadi A, Choi KR, Takada S, Zimmerman FJ.