Putting Advanced Health Equity Analytics Methods into Practice

Stratification of health care quality metrics by sociodemographic factors and non-medical drivers of health is a key tool in our quality toolbox. However, stratifying by only one characteristic at a time can miss important nuances, and evaluating a single quality measure in isolation from other related measures may not show “bigger picture” gaps that could benefit from coordinated approaches to improvement. New advanced data analytics methods have sprung up to tackle these challenges.

NCQA partnered with three health care organizations to implement some of these methods using real-world data, to understand the validity, utility and feasibility of applying these methods in practice.

Early Insights

We’re still summarizing our findings, but we have some early insights to share for interested organizations.

Read more in our July 2025 blog post : Empowering Organizations to Address Gaps in Care: Putting Health Equity Analytics Methods into Practice. Early findings that stood out:

• It’s all about choices. Small decisions in method design can significantly influence the meaning and impact of equity metrics.
• Organizational culture matters. Align analytic methods with your organization’s values around detail, transparency, and presentation.
• Link to a specific business use case. Choose approaches that directly support your business goals to maximize relevance and buy-in.
• Challenge assumptions. Be open to findings that challenge existing beliefs—they may reveal new opportunities for improvement.
• When in doubt, prioritize clarity and communication.  Transparent, easy-to-explain methods foster understanding and support across stakeholders.

We also held a webinar in August 2025, where we shared more about current findings, and heard from representatives of our three partner organizations about their experiences and lessons learned from this work.

Find the materials from the webinar, “Measuring Equitable High Quality Care: Putting Health Equity Analytics Methods into Practice,” here:

What’s Next

Check back for more information to come! For data lovers, we plan to publish quantitative results from our testing efforts to inform future methods development. In early 2026, we’ll release a playbook of practical methods for organizations implementing these and similar approaches.

We thank the California Health Care Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund for supporting this work.