Measuring and Promoting SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Equity: Development of a COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Index.

Purpose: The coronavirus pandemic has created the greatest public health crisis in a century, causing >500,000 deaths in the United States alone. Minoritized and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups have borne a disproportionate burden of severe illness, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19. Recently developed FDA-approved vaccines have been shown to significantly reduce severe COVID-19-related outcomes. Vaccination campaigns have the potential to advance health equity by prioritizing allocation to those at highest risk while striving for herd immunity. Large integrated health systems have been faced with the daunting task of meeting the rapidly evolving needs of diverse patient populations for the provision of population-based testing, treatment, education, and now vaccine distribution. We have designed a COVID-19 vaccine equity index (CVEI) to guide health system vaccination strategy. Methods: We considered proportion unvaccinated within a health care system. We then used real-time readily available electronic health record (EHR) COVID-19 testing positivity and proportion hospitalized to measure burden of illness by race/ethnicity. We used conditional probability and statistical theory to measure equity for unvaccinated individuals and to derive an index to highlight these inequities for specific subgroups. Results: We present an illustrative hypothetical example using simulated data for which we calculated the CVEI for non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic patients. In the example, non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic patients had inequitable outcomes. Conclusion: The index can be widely implemented to promote more equitable outcomes among racial/ethnic groups, reducing morbidity and mortality within the overall population as we pursue the collective goal of herd immunity through mass vaccination.

Preventing infectious diseases for healthy ageing: The VITAL public-private partnership project.

Prevention of infectious diseases through immunisation of the growing ageing adult population is essential to improve healthy ageing. However, many licenced and recommended vaccines for this age group show signs of waning of the protective effect due to declining immune responses (immuno-senescence) and decreasing vaccine uptake. Today's major challenge is to improve vaccine effectiveness and uptake and to deploy efficient vaccination strategies for this age group. The Vaccines and InfecTious diseases in the Ageing popuLation (VITAL) project, with partners from 17 academic & research groups and public institutes as well as seven industry collaborators, aims to address this challenge. The ambition is to provide evidence-based knowledge to local decision makers. Using a holistic and multidisciplinary approach and novel analytical methods, VITAL will provide tools that allow the development of targeted immunisation programs for ageing adults in European countries. The project is based on four pillars focussing on the assessment of the burden of vaccine-preventable diseases in ageing adults, the dissection of the mechanisms underlying immuno-senescence, the analysis of the clinical and economic public health impact of vaccination strategies and the development of educational resources for healthcare professionals. By the end of the project, a clear, detailed, and integrated program should be available for implementing a consistent, affordable, and sustainable vaccination strategy for ageing adults with regular evaluations of its impact over time.

Disparities In Outcomes Among COVID-19 Patients In A Large Health Care System In California.

As the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic spreads throughout the United States, evidence is mounting that racial and ethnic minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups are bearing a disproportionate burden of illness and death. We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis of COVID-19 patients at Sutter Health, a large integrated health system in northern California, to measure potential disparities. We used Sutter's integrated electronic health record to identify adults with suspected and confirmed COVID-19, and we used multivariable logistic regression to assess risk of hospitalization, adjusting for known risk factors, such as race/ethnicity, sex, age, health, and socioeconomic variables. We analyzed 1,052 confirmed cases of COVID-19 from the period January 1-April 8, 2020. Among our findings, we observed that compared with non-Hispanic white patients, non-Hispanic African American patients had 2.7 times the odds of hospitalization, after adjustment for age, sex, comorbidities, and income. We explore possible explanations for this, including societal factors that either result in barriers to timely access to care or create circumstances in which patients view delaying care as the most sensible option. Our study provides real-world evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in the presentation of COVID-19.

Measuring Health Equity for Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions in a Large Integrated Health Care System: The Development of an Index.

Disparities in outcomes for preventive and primary health care services often result when vulnerable patients rely on episodic encounters for emergency services that do not meet their long-term health needs. Understanding health outcomes in socially or economically disadvantaged subgroups is crucial to improving community health, and it requires innovative analytics and dynamic application of clinical and population data. While it is common practice to use proxy indicators, such as quality of life and mortality, when discussing health equity, these have shown limited utility and are rarely applied at a population-level within a health system. Therefore, we designed and implemented an index, calculated as the ratio of observed-to-expected encounters, to identify and quantify health inequalities in health care systems. Providing equitable care, as measured by health outcomes, is analogous to precision medicine applied to social determinants. For health systems, the use of this index will facilitate the development of specially-tailored interventions to address inequity and provides a tool to measure the impact of such programs.