UCSF launches dashboard to track how social determinants affect population health

This article was first published in Becker's Hospital Review.

UC San Francisco developed an interactive population health mapping website that allows users to analyze the effect of factors such as social determinants of health on neighborhood-level health outcomes.

The website, dubbed Health Atlas, currently features data-driven insights on COVID-19, food security, housing insecurity and cancer in Latinx enclaves. UCSF researchers created the website to consider population health principles in their research, education and clinical care. The data tracker includes data at the census tract and county level for more than 100 contextual characteristics across California.

"The vision was to provide researchers an easy-to-use tool to explore what factors can impact health on a population level," said Debby Oh, Health Atlas project lead and epidemiologist at UCSF, according to the news release. "We wanted to provide beautiful maps, well-informed and well-written content, the ability to pool geographies, a comparison of variables and downloadable data."

Health Atlas reports census data from publicly available sources including the American Community Survey from the Census Bureau and the CDC's 500 Cities Project. Health Atlas is also reporting COVID-19 case data from the Los Angeles Times.