Health equity has become an increasingly popular research topic during the course of the past 25 years. Many factors explain this trend, including a growing demand from policymakers, better and more plentiful household data, and increased computer power. But progress in quantifying and understanding health equities would not have been possible without appropriate analytic techniques. These techniques are the subject of this book.
The book includes chapters dealing with data issues and the measurement of the key variables in health equity analysis.
(Part i), quantitative techniques for interpreting and presenting health equity data (Part ii), and the application of these techniques in the analysis of equity in health care utilization and health care spending (Part iii). The aim of the book is to provide researchers and analysts with a step-by-step practical guide to the measurement of a variety of aspects of health equity, with worked examples and computer code, mostly for the computer program Stata. It is hoped that these step-by-step guides, and the easy-to-implement computer routines contained in them, will help stimulate yet more research in the field, especially policy-oriented health equity research that enables researchers to help policymakers develop and evaluate programs to reduce health inequities.
The book can be ordered online, and electronic versions of the chapters can be downloaded using the links below. Also available are Powerpoint lectures of chapters, customizable "do" files for use in Stata, a Stata "ado" file for dominance checking, and an Excel file for computing standard errors of the concentration index with grouped data.
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Readers of "Analyzing Health Equity Using Household Survey Data" may also be interested in a new computer program known as "ADePT-Health" that automates the methods outlined in the book, allowing users to produce quickly and with a minimal risk of errors most of the tables and charts in the book. ADePT-Health will appeal to the health equity analyst who wants to focus on data-preparation, interpreting results, and thinking about policy implications, rather than on Stata programming. ADePT-Health dramatically reduces the time taken to prepare standard health equity tables, and makes more widely accessible all the methods covered in Analyzing Health Equity Using Household Survey Data. The health module is one of several in ADePT; others include inequality, poverty, safety nets, and labor markets. Details of ADePT are available at www.worldbank.org/adept.