Understanding Health Equity in Emergency Preparedness and Response: ASPR’s Health Equity Baseline Analysis Process

Abstract Information: The COVID-19 pandemic was a stark reminder of the inequities that exist in our nation and the way these inequities impact individuals’ access to, experiences with, and outcomes within our health care system. The HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) leads the nation's medical and public health preparedness for, response to, and recovery from disasters and public health emergencies. ASPR has a vested interest in understanding how needs of underserved populations are elevated and incorporated into state and local planning for emergencies. The HHS ASPR Office of Strategy, Policy, and Requirements (SPR) and Deloitte Consulting, LLP, aimed to assess how and the extent to which marginalized populations are incorporated in state and local response planning, which includes pandemic response planning, as well as in exercises and responses. To do this, the team used a mixed methods approach that utilized natural language processing (NLP) as a way to analyze large amounts of unstructured data. To set the stage for this study, the evaluation team interviewed individuals across eight ASPR program areas (n=8) who had significant contact with state and local partners to understand how they conceive of equity and how they are beginning to incorporate thinking around equity into their activities. The evaluation team then designed a data analysis approach using NLP to analyze hundreds (n=677) of unstructured response plans and after-action reports. Through this study, ASPR gained baseline information on the current state of response and identified promising practices that were taken to plan and care for underserved communities. This study has been critical to ASPR’s subsequent policy actions to further incorporate health equity into all of ASPR’s work. This presentation will focus upon the process and methods ASPR used to conduct this pilot study.