In accordance with the World Well being Group, “Three distinguishing options, when mixed, flip mere variations or variations in well being right into a social inequity in well being. They’re systematic, socially produced (and subsequently modifiable) and unfair.
That’s how an ISPOR Particular Curiosity Group Report by Griffiths et al. (2025) begins. The well being fairness primer supplies and overview of the literature. The paper identifies quite a few key sources of social drawback: “socioeconomic standing, race and ethnicity, gender, geographic location, incapacity” amongst others.
Whereas decreasing well being disparities is a laudable objective, there are a variety of different priorities that additionally go into the social welfare operate together with “…concern for effectivity in rising complete well being, concern to prioritize severely unwell sufferers, and concern for guaranteeing applicable procedures of resolution making.” For example, ought to well being advantages be valued equally or ought to we worth well being advantages that accrue to extra deprived or extra severely unwell sufferers extra. Who’s well being advantages ought to we worth extra: poor sufferers who’ve gentle illness or wealthy sufferers who’ve extreme illness? The solutions to those questions aren’t easy. Because the paper notes:
…measuring and addressing well being disparities is difficult given the interaction amongst many complicated elements that form well being outcomes and may give rise to various moral considerations
The paper identifies completely different dimensions by way of which contemplating well being fairness considerations might be helpful.
The paper additionally supplies examples of functions of distributional value effectiveness evaluation (DCEA) and prolonged value effectiveness evaluation (ECEA). DCEA requires information on not less than 4 key dimensions: (i) baseline well being inequalities (ii) distributional relative therapy results, (iii) the distribution of alternative prices, and (iv) inhabitants inequality aversion.
The authors spotlight 4 key sources of inequality:
- Want: What number of sufferers of a given group have a illness?
- Receipt: Amongst these in want, what number of have entry?
- Brief-term results: How do variations in baseline dangers for the situation in addition to the consequences of the intervention
- Lengthy-term results. Variations within the alternative value of funding the innovation
Whereas we now have strategies for quantifying the impression of latest well being applied sciences, there are nonetheless limitations. First, it’s unclear if key decisionmakers perceive the problems associated to well being disparities and/or if addressing these inequalities is a precedence for them. Second, well being disparity-inclusive financial modelling is extra information intensive than normal CEA modelling. Third, well being fairness is just one dimension of broader societal worth that stakeholders ought to take into account.
To study extra about evaluating well being fairness inside HEOR, I do suggest you learn the full paper.
