OBJECTIVE To provide a targeted portrait of socioeconomic disparities in health care quality in four countries and how those disparities have changed over time. DESIGN Within each country, comparisons between the highest and lowest quintiles of socioeconomic status were made to determine if disparities exist and if any observed disparities have been decreasing over a 5-year period. SETTING ...

Substantial research has documented pervasive disparities in the prevalence, severity, and morbidity of asthma among minority populations compared with non-Latino white subjects. The underlying causes of these disparities are not well understood, and as a result, the leverage points to address them remain unclear. A multilevel framework for integrating research in asthma health disparities is p...

In its study of racial and ethnic disparities in health care, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that there were large and significant disparities in the quality and quantity of health care received by minority groups in the United States. This article shows that where a patient lives can itself have a large impact on the level and quality of health care the patient receives. Since black...

CONTEXT Health disparities are among the critical public health challenges. OBJECTIVES To analyze the extent to which local health departments (LHDs) perform activities for addressing health disparities, changes in proportion of LHDs' performing those activities since 2005, and factors associated with variation in such engagement. METHODS We used the 2013 National Profile of LHDs Survey to ...

PURPOSE Social disparities among youth have been recognized as an important influence on disease risk later in the life cycle. Despite this, social problems are seldom assessed in a clinical setting. The primary objective of our study was to evaluate the impact of social disparities on the health of youth. METHODS A self-directed, web-based screening system was used to identify social dispari...

Health disparities remain vast around the world and are perpetuated by error-prone information technology systems, administrative inefficiencies wasteful global health spending. Blockchain is a novel, distributed peer-to-peer ledger that uses unique, immutable time-stamped blocks of records or sets data linked as chains through cryptography to more reliably transparently store transfer data. Va...

a Bold New Vision of Health Disparities Intervention Research In 2003, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institute on Aging, and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research established the Centers for Population Health and Health Disparities (CPHHD) Program in response to a strategic priority at the National Inst...

CONTEXT A disaster is indiscriminate in whom it affects. Limited research has shown that the poor and medically underserved, especially in rural areas, bear an inequitable amount of the burden. OBJECTIVE To review the literature on the combined effects of a disaster and living in an area with existing health or health care disparities on a community's health, access to health resources, and q...