Abstract:
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There is increased interest in eliminating health disparity in U.S. (e.g., Healthy People 2020) and world-wide. Broadly defined, health disparity refers to inequalities in health status related to ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education, environment, and geographic locations. To make informed health policy decisions, it is essential to properly measure disparities and assess their trend over time. HD*Calc is a free statistical software that implements eleven most commonly used measures of health disparity and provides corresponding 95% confidence intervals. However, evaluations of the performance of these confidence intervals are lacking. Through a comprehensive simulation study we have evaluated the coverage properties of these confidence intervals. We also illustrate the use of HD*Calc with age-adjusted cancer incidence rates at the national, state, and county level.
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