Looking to Community Experts for Guidance: Defining Health Disparity

At OMNI, when faced with a question, we rely heavily on our core value of Inquiry. Inquiry for us doesn't only mean hitting the books and academic journals but searching for answers and learning from our clients and partners, especially when discussing equity and a community's historical context. We recently developed a resource for the Virginia State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup (SEOW) that highlighted the concept of health disparities and how data can be used to recognize, understand, and reduce health disparities in Virginia. As we began our work, what seemed like a straightforward question, how to define and visualize health disparity, turned out to be much more complicated, and so we turned to the SEOW members for guidance. Deriving the appropriate definition for this resource taught us a great deal about both the concept of health disparities itself and a powerful lesson about our roles as evaluators and researchers.