Identify A Health Equity Focus
What does it mean to identify a health equity focus, and why is it important?
Identifying a health equity focus means selecting a specific inequity for your initiative to address. A clear, well-defined focus keeps interventions targeted and actionable, and allows your team to align resources, design effective interventions, and track meaningful progress. Your focus might center on a social driver of health (e.g., housing instability) or a specific health outcome (e.g., blood pressure control among Black patients with hypertension). Health and healthcare inequities vary across populations, regions, and healthcare systems. There are always numerous inequities that could become the focus of a health equity initiative. In multi-organization collaboratives, partners may have different views on which inequities to prioritize and address. This can introduce challenges for identifying a focus area.
When should I identify a health equity focus?
This component should be one of the first steps in any health equity initiative. Without a clear focus, teams risk designing interventions that are too broad, ineffective, or fail to address the most pressing inequities. It is especially critical to work through this component when:
- Launching a health equity initiative – Ensuring the team has a shared understanding of the problem.
- Reviewing or revising organizational quality improvement priorities – Aligning equity efforts with existing quality improvement work. An equity focus should be incorporated into all quality improvement activities.
The chart below details the steps as well as the approximate number of meetings for which to plan, while recognizing that the estimates will vary from team to team.
| Key Activities | Time Estimate: ~15+ Hours |
|---|---|
| Understand the priorities of the people you serve, team members, and other leaders | Variable – based on relationships already established |
| Measure the experience of the people you serve | 4-6 one-hour meetings |
| Stratify your data and learn about gaps | 4-6 one-hour meetings |
| Analyze priorities and opportunities for action | 3-6 one-hour meetings |
| Select a focus | 4-6 one-hour meetings |
How should I identify a health equity focus?
Begin having your team review the Identify a Health Equity Focus presentation, which introduces the relationship between quality, disparities, and equity; intersectionality; systems thinking; and targeted universalism. Built-in discussion prompts and breakout activities help your team understand the process of identifying a focus area.
Next, review four key resources:
Applying an Equity and Anti-Racist Lens to Quality Metrics and Data explains how presenting health data without a racial equity lens can unintentionally reinforce racism. It offers guidance for presenting stratified data in ways that highlight systemic causes rather than individual deficits — including choosing equitable benchmarks, naming root causes explicitly, and using strengths-based framing.
Using Data to Reduce Disparities and Improve Quality provides a high-level introduction to key concepts underlying the use of stratified data to identify disparities, design equity-focused interventions, measure impact, communicate findings with stakeholders, and sustain equity work over time. It also provides real-world examples and evaluation tools and introduces the topic of integrating quantitative and qualitative data.
Advancing Health Equity: An Approach to Systematically Identify and Evaluate Health Disparities from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) presents a detailed, four-step approach for identifying inequities and constructing metrics that advance health equity for healthcare organizations and systems. It is based on the current, cumulative state of health equity measurement, research, and practice, representing the consensus of more than 35 subject-matter experts from an array of healthcare settings, including clinical, quality, payer, academic, and administrative, as well as the relevant quality improvement and disparities reduction literature.
Finally, the Health Equity Focus Worksheet helps teams by providing a convenient structure to consistently document key information and evaluation criteria to facilitate systematic comparison of potential health equity focus areas. We encourage teams to adapt and tailor the worksheet criteria to meet their needs.
Resources to Identify a Health Equity Focus
Identify a Health Equity Focus
This presentation introduces core concepts linking quality, disparities, and equity, and guides teams through the process of selecting a health equity focus. Key topics include intersectionality, systems thinking, targeted universalism, and using data effectively. Built-in breakout activities help teams align on a focus area and plan next steps.
Applying an Equity and Anti-racist Lens to Quality Metrics and Data
This resource explains how presenting stratified health data without a racial equity lens can unintentionally reinforce racism. It offers six concrete practices for more equitable data presentation — including choosing equitable benchmarks, disaggregating data, naming root causes, and using strengths-based framing — with real perinatal care examples illustrating each.
Using Data to Reduce Disparities and Improve Quality
This resource outlines a step-by-step approach to using stratified quality data to identify disparities, design equity-focused care interventions, and measure impact. It emphasizes integrating both quantitative and qualitative data, engaging patients and community members in root cause analysis, and communicating findings effectively to different stakeholder groups. It also includes practical guidance on choosing the right denominators and sustaining equity work over time.
Health Equity Focus Worksheet
This worksheet helps teams systematically evaluate and compare potential health equity focus areas using consistent criteria — including documented disparities, structural factors, existing momentum, available measures, actionability, community partnership, and scalability. An example using asthma control is provided to guide teams through the process.
Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Advancing Health Equity: An Approach to Systematically Identify and Evaluate Health Disparities
A detailed, four-step approach for identifying inequities and constructing metrics that advance health equity for healthcare organizations and systems. It is based on the current, cumulative state of health equity measurement, research, and practice representing the consensus of more than 35 subject-matter experts from an array of healthcare settings including clinical, quality, payer, academic, and administrative as well as the relevant quality improvement and disparities reduction literature.
Assessing Activities to Identify a Health Equity Focus
This resource will help you assess and address three common challenges in identifying a health equity focus: information overload leading to analysis paralysis; accessing, reporting, sharing, and analyzing data; and excluding patients and community-based organizations from the process of identifying a health equity focus.
About the Roadmap Goal and Objective Setting Tool
This tool helps your team realize your vision to reduce and eliminate health and healthcare inequities by providing a centralized resource to:
- Establish process goals that align with each Roadmap component;
- Document task status, champions, and detailed notes;
- Monitor progress across multiple Roadmap components simultaneously; and
- Promote consistent team communication, accountability, and progress.
Use this tool to facilitate and document the development, implementation, and evaluation phases of your health equity initiative.