New Report Highlights Difficulties in Assessing and Measuring Health Disparities

A new report from The Commonwealth Fund has found that:

…the lack of standardization across rating and regulatory health equity metrics may undermine efforts to achieve equity. Metrics and methodologies must be aligned to accurately assess health equity progress and drive institutional change and improvements for patient populations (Bonfiglio et al., 2025).

The overarching theme of the report is that the tools used by large organizations, such as the American Hospital Association (AHA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), U.S. News & World Report, and Vizient, all use broadly different metrics for measuring health equity and disparities with little overlap, little agreement on what to measure and how, and with little oversight from any agency or authority to establish standardized metrics and assessment tools.