UCSF Health Atlas, an interactive mapping tool for measuring health inequities that debuted just as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, is relaunching this month with data from all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, along with new climate and other data.
The mapping tool allows users to explore the relationship between more than 120 variables from more than 20 data sources - everything from health outcomes to food insecurity, education and historical redlining - and visualize them at seven different geographic levels including census tract, ZIP code and congressional district.
These data will be critical for our partners across the country to better understand neighborhoods and resolve local inequities."
The Health Atlas team partnered with the Health Equity Action Network, a national consortium of 11 research centers that work to reduce health disparities, by expanding the data nationally and including measures of structural racism and neighborhood deprivation that affect people's health and longevity.
The UC Center for Climate, Health and Equity, which is housed at UCSF and tackles health issues linked to climate change, contributed detailed measures for California, including air pollution, heat and extreme precipitation. The center plans to expand the database to display climate-related data on the Health Atlas for all 50 states in 2025.
"We didn't build this map for clicks and likes. We built this tool so that people can identify and reduce health disparities in the communities that are important to them," said Debby Oh, PhD, a data scientist in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics who is leading the Health Atlas project. "These data will be critical for our partners across the country to better understand neighborhoods and resolve local inequities."
