New Paper Illustrates how Economic Modeling can Facilitate Health Equity
August 2021
Jeffrey Hoch, Associate Director of the UC Davis Center for Healthcare Policy and Research (CHPR) and Chief of the Division of Health Policy and Management in the Department of Public Health Sciences (PHS), is the lead author of "How Economic Decision Modeling Can Facilitate Health Equity," published this month in the AMA Journal of Ethics.
The article offers examples of how economic modeling, through its design and use, can motivate inquiry and research into health equity. Using examples from some of CHPR’s recent research projects, the authors describe how modeling can be used to study reduction of health inequity, and thereby motivate different types of investments into rectifying such inequities. “This article also considers how equity fits into cost-effectiveness frameworks [and] how economic modeling can broaden the range of options for improving health equity,” among other considerations.
Logan Trenaman, Ph.D., who was a postdoctoral fellow with CHPR when this work was carried out, Shannon Hearney, M.P.H., a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Group in Public Health Sciences (GGPHS), and Carolyn Dewa, Ph.D., M.P.H., a professor in PHS and the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, co-authored this paper with Professor Hoch.