Traditional health economic evaluation mainly focuses on efficiency and lacks quantitative consideration of equity. To further quantify different equity factors based on traditional economic evaluation, equity-informative economic evaluations have been gradually developed. This paper reviews and summarizes 5 methods to incorporate equity into economic evaluations, among which the 3 widely used including equity-based weighting (EBW), distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA), and extended cost-effectiveness analysis (ECEA) are introduced in detail regarding basic concept, data requirements, advantages and disadvantages. The equity-informative economic evaluations will provide an effective tool for decision-makers to trade off between the efficiency maximization and distributional equity in the allocation of health resources formally and transparently, and will have a good prospect in China. However, the lack of relevant basic data is one of the main challenges limiting the practical application of such methods. It is also a research barrier that future researchers in related fields need to break through.

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