Health Equity
This term refers to the persistent differences in health outcomes linked to race, gender, geography, and income.
What are health disparities?
Variation in county-level access to hospitals with obstetric services explains why rural counties have higher maternal mortality.
What is the rural hospital access gap?
This term refers to how women’s health issues are understudied or minimized in medical education and research.
What is the gender data gap?
Disability disparities may be underestimated when surveys and clinical studies exclude people with disabilities because of inaccessible research procedures. This creates this methodological problem.
What is selection bias?
If Black patients receive less aggressive pain treatment than White patients because providers underestimate their pain, this represents a disparity associated with this healthcare mechanism.
What is implicit bias?
Unequal exposure to pollution, hazardous waste, or environmental risks among marginalized communities is a concern within this field.
What is environmental justice?
Older adults may experience disparities when providers assume that symptoms are an inevitable part of aging and therefore fail to investigate them. This is an example of this bias.
What is age-based bias?
This landmark U.S. law required the inclusion of women and minorities in federally funded health research beginning in 1993.
What is the NIH Revitalization Act?
The conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age are described by this influential framework
What are the social determinants of health?
A patient has insurance but cannot find a specialist who accepts their plan. This is an example of a disparity involving this dimension of access.
What is provider availability?
Approximately ___ of LGBTQ+ adults, and up to___ of trans folk or gender non-conforming people (specifically) have reported experiencing discrimination in healthcare.
56% & 70%
Diseases such as sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, and Chagas are grouped under this term because of chronic underfunding for research.
What are neglected tropical diseases?
This epidemiological pattern describes progressively better health outcomes as socioeconomic position increases across multiple levels of the social hierarchy.
What is the social gradient in health?
This term describes an area where residents have inadequate access to healthcare professionals relative to population needs.
What is a Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA)?
A physician assumes that a disabled patient's symptoms are simply consequences of their disability and fails to investigate a new condition. This illustrates this type of bias.
What is diagnostic overshadowing?
This economic phenomenon explains why pharmaceutical companies avoid researching conditions that primarily affect low-income populations.
What is market failure?
This model describes healthcare access through dimensions such as affordability, availability, accommodation, accessibility, and acceptability.
What is the 5 A's framework?
This part of the country, containing cities like Detroit and Cleveland, experienced massive industrial decline that worsened health conditions.
What is the Rust Belt?
In recent years (2023–2025), this group has the lowest life expectancy among major U.S. racial/ethnic groups.
Who are American Indian & Alaska Native (AI/AN) peoples?
Indigenous populations’ lack of genomic representation has led to their being excluded from this field of personalized medicine.
What is pharmacogenomics?