A Roadmap for Promoting Health Equity and Eliminating Disparities: The Four I's for Health Equity

Despite the nation's advancements in health and medicine, care is still not equally available and accessible across communities, populations, socioeconomic groups, and ethnicities. The National Quality Forum (NQF) created a roadmap for the U.S. healthcare system (i.e., providers and payers) to reduce health and healthcare disparities through performance measurement and associated policy levers.

Focusing on selected conditions as case studies (e.g. cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic kidney disease, infant mortality/low birthweight, and mental illness), the roadmap lays out four actions: prioritizing measures that can help to identify and monitor disparities, implementing evidence-based interventions to reduce disparities, investing in the development and use of measures to assess interventions that reduce disparities, and providing incentives to reduce disparities.

Associate Center Director Ninez Ponce is a co-chair of the National Quality Forum committee that produced the report.

• National Quality Forum