At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Devex and AstraZeneca convened a roundtable that brought together senior leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to discuss one of the most pressing yet overlooked societal and economic challenges: health equity.
Healthy populations form the backbone of thriving societies and economies. Yet, health care systems worldwide are faced with what experts call a “health tsunami” — driven by an array of factors, from aging populations and the silent pandemic of chronic diseases to increasingly frequent emergencies stemming from climate change, international conflicts, and disease outbreaks. The rising burden of costly noncommunicable diseases, or NCDs, is particularly alarming, with escalating health care costs that threaten countries’ growth outlook and exacerbate social inequalities.
This is why addressing health equity has never been more urgent. Along with genetic predisposition, social determinants — from environmental factors, income levels, education, or geographic location — shape health outcomes, leaving some communities more at risk of disease while also facing greater barriers to care. Improving equitable health outcomes requires a systematic approach to tackle these deep-rooted imbalances.
Why has addressing health equity never been more urgent?
The rising burden of diseases, including NCDs, disproportionately affects underserved populations such as rural communities, women, and people with a lower socioeconomic status.
Without urgent action to address health equity — ensuring everyone has the best possible chance of living their healthiest life — these disparities will continue to widen, making it even harder for affected communities to break the cycle of poor health and economic hardship.
Health disparities exist in every country. From Brazil to Japan, Kenya to the United States, certain patient populations face significant barriers to screening, early diagnosis, and timely and quality care. What may appear as cultural or socioeconomic differences can manifest in stark health inequities — within countries, cities, and even neighborhoods.
Perhaps most concerning is the persistent lack of recognition, prioritization, and action on this challenge. Many health care stakeholders remain unaware of both the profound human, social, and economic cost of health inequities and the tremendous benefits that could be unlocked by closing health care gaps for underserved communities.
With the scale of the challenge front of mind, roundtable participants convened to discuss and formulate the following key recommendations aimed at advancing health equity and improving access to care.
The central takeaway from the gathering was that greater health equity requires a shift in how we think and act: making equity the foundation of health care design, rather than an afterthought. In practical terms, this means leveraging local data and community insights to identify critical care gaps and direct resources where they are most needed, rather than pushing one-size-fits-all solutions that don't address specific community needs.
Embracing this approach requires a fundamental shift from supply-driven to demand-driven solutions — meaning moving from focusing on what we can provide to focusing on what people need. Public-private partnerships can be crucial in aiding this process, as exemplified by the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience and a successful city-level cancer care initiative in Barcelona, Spain. By uniting local health care stakeholders — from major hospitals to patient support groups — and using data sharing to map obstacles along the patient journey, this initiative enabled a series of tailored interventions that significantly reduced care delivery gaps and reduced treatment abandonment.
Another point of consensus among participants was that community involvement is not just beneficial — rather, it is essential for equitable care. Whether through training childbirth attendants in rural Zambia, telehealth providers in Ecuador, or earlier diagnosis of rare diseases globally, upskilling and building trust in community caregivers has proven indispensable for reaching underserved populations. In Brazil, the INSPIRE program, which receives funding from AstraZeneca, partners with the local government to increase access to early detection of chronic respiratory diseases in remote communities by providing services like lung cancer screening, and pulmonology assessments.
Nonetheless, several roundtable attendees cautioned against the risk of overburdening these essential frontline workers. Scaling the capacity of community health practitioners should start by centering their needs and providing them with the education needed to ensure their communities receive quality care.
Breakthroughs in AI and novel diagnostics hold immense promise to address health disparities. From AI-accelerated drug development to technology that can predict more than 1,000 diseases before diagnosis, a number of technological advancements offer solutions to improve access and address persistent disparities in health care access.
Despite this potential, roundtable participants raised the importance of responsible implementation to ensure that technological progress serves as a true enabler of equity — instead of widening the gap. This requires careful evaluation of potential risks, robust safeguards for data privacy and security, and ensuring that necessary infrastructure and capacity-building investments are strategically deployed to bridge, rather than widen, existing digital divides.
Sustaining partnerships and securing cofunding to curb health inequity requires proof. High-quality impact data in specific underserved groups is what validates interventions, demonstrates value to stakeholders, and enables results to be monitored. Therefore, focusing on robust metrics and documented outcomes is critical to attracting support from existing and potential collaborators.
Yet gathering data is not enough. Only when shared with the right stakeholders does this information become valuable. Open collaboration enables cross-sector learning, facilitates knowledge transfer, and allows successful models to be adapted and scaled to address health disparities in different contexts.
Building on this evidence-based approach, participants called for leveraging existing successes rather than “reinventing the wheel.” Taking valuable lessons from public health achievements, such as the decline in childhood mortality, and actioning evidence-based recommendations to strengthen health systems, such as the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience, can enable efficient and sustainable adoption of approaches that work.
Participants also noted that this evidence-driven approach requires the strengthening of basic health care infrastructure, including data collection systems, investment in the health workforce, and access to clinical trials and treatment, to create a more robust foundation for interventions that close care gaps for underserved populations. Multilateral entities also play a key role in fostering favorable conditions for multisectoral collaboration and collective action.
Health care alone cannot solve deep-rooted inequities. True progress requires nations to tackle systemic issues such as poverty, inequalities in access to education, and social discrimination. Still, by making equity central to health care design and scaling targeted, demand-driven approaches, participants were optimistic about meaningfully reducing health disparities and contributing to these broader goals of societal change.
The diverse voices at the Davos roundtable — from public officials to private sector leaders — reflect a growing recognition that improving health equity requires urgent, collaborative action.
While the path to greater health equity will require investment, the cost of inaction is far greater. Through more partnerships, community-driven solutions, and responsible use of technology, participants concluded we can work toward a future where quality health care reaches all communities — no matter who they are or where they live.
Watch this video to learn more about the INSPIRE program in Brazil.