The Health Opportunity and Equity (HOPE) Initiative launched in 2018 to start a new conversation about health, one that embraces the idea that every person in the U.S. should have the best possible health outcome regardless of race, ethnicity, income, or ZIP code.
To help advance this conversation, The Center on Society and Health partnered with the National Collaborative for Health Equity as part of a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to create a resource to measure the opportunity gap and track progress towards health equity at the national, state, and local level.
HOPE tracks 27 indicators on health outcomes and factors that shape health and well-being – such as social and economic factors, community and safety conditions, physical environment, and access to healthcare. The research on these social determinants of health identified the opportunity gaps for people of color that frequently lead to racial inequities in health outcomes, and resulted in the development of a National Health Equity Index.
The full website launched in Winter 2020. You can find it at www.hopeinitiative.org
In addition to the website, the New England Journal of Medicine published HOPE data in an interactive format on their website. The graphic was developed for their Race & Medicine page as part of the commitment to antiracism.