Learn More

Putting Advanced Health Equity Analytics Methods into Practice

Everyone deserves the opportunity to achieve their best possible health. New advanced data analytics methods can help organizations identify quality gaps across multiple factors.

Stratification of healthcare 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 related measures may not reveal “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 healthcare organizations to implement some of these methods using real-world data to assess the validity, utility and feasibility of applying them in practice.

From Insight to Action: A Practical Playbook for Implementation

Cracking the Code: A Health Equity Analytics Implementation Playbook for Healthcare Organizations offers a practical framework for organizations that want to move from identifying disparities to acting on them. The playbook helps health plans, health systems and quality improvement teams select and build a health equity scoring approach, using advanced analytics to combine multiple quality measures and demographic factors so they can better detect inequities, track progress and guide improvement efforts.

This playbook is designed for organizations at every stage of their health equity journey—from those just beginning with simple measure stratification to those ready for more advanced composite scoring and benchmarking. In addition to outlining technical considerations, such as selecting focus areas, demographic factors and comparison groups, the playbook emphasizes the organizational conditions for success, including internal analytic capacity, stakeholder buy-in and opportunities to align across partners serving shared populations.

Download the Playbook

In our July 2025 blog post, Empowering Organizations to Address Gaps in Care: Putting Health Equity Analytics Methods into Practice, we highlighted several themes that emerged from this work:

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 shared further insights from this work and heard from representatives of each of the three partner organizations during an August 2025 webinar, where they discussed their experiences and lessons learned. Find the recording and materials from the webinar, Measuring Equitable High-Quality Care: Putting Health Equity Analytics Methods Into Practice, here:

View the Slides

What’s Next

Check back for updates. For data lovers, we plan to publish quantitative results from our testing to inform the development of future methods. We thank the California Health Care Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund for supporting this work.