Measuring healthcare inequities using the Gini index

Abstract

Questions of healthcare inequities have been of continuing concern to health researchers, planners, and policymakers. The answers to such questions can be difficult to interpret, but deeply affect policy formulation, resource allocation, and our perceptions of the fairness and compassion inherent in the institutions of government and society as a whole. This paper describes the data warehouse implementation of several measures of inequality drawn from the field of economics, including the Gini index. Past research has often focused on using these economic measures to characterize a small set of health status indicators, usually at fairly high levels of aggregation, with comparisons between states or nations. In this research, an ongoing healthcare data warehouse project under the auspices of the Center for Health Outcomes Research at the University of South Florida provides the infrastructure for exploring hundreds of health status indicators at the ZIP code level. The goal is to include information on healthcare inequities in the many reports generated for policymakers throughout Florida.