HEART Study: Development of the Health Equitability Assessment and Readiness Tool

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PROJECT SUMMARY Even though highly efficacious biomedical prevention and treatment interventions exist for a range of infectious diseases, implementation has been marred by pervasive and unacceptable racialized disparities and led to inequitable population health effects. While public health increasingly recognizes health equity as a priority, at present we lack — and urgently need — a scientifically grounded, empirically supported, tool to assess the equity capacity or equitability of public health programming and implementation. Such an instrument would enable researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to advance equitable outcomes through anticipating gaps before they occur, direct context-specific capacities, target improvements and resources and thereby accelerate progress toward health equity. The Health Equitability Assessment and Readiness Tool (HEART) will address this significant gap by completing the following specific aims 1) use a formal set of mixed method activities to support the conceptual development and concept mapping of equitability into measurable domains, 2) develop the content, structure, and design of the HEART measure and conduct preliminary psychometric analysis to assess validity and internal reliability, and 3) to implement and evaluate HEART in various HIV program settings. The expected outcome is a scientifically validated and practical measure of public health program’s equitability that can be easily integrated in community and clinical settings. The principal investigator is well-positioned to lead the study activities with the support of her established team of collaborators with complementary expertise in infectious disease prevention, health equity, implementation science, and measurement development. The proposed project is in alignment with the New Innovator’s Award’s mission to support “risky…innovative and high impact research concepts that will advance key concepts on broad, important problems in biomedical research.”