Tools & Strategies News

UCSF Creates Interactive Website for Population Health, COVID-19

The population health website will feature regularly updated data on COVID-19 cases and deaths in California.

UCSF creates interactive website for population health, COVID-19

Source: Thinkstock

By Jessica Kent

- The UC San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine Dean’s Office of Population Health and Health Equity has launched a new interactive mapping website that curates publicly available community data, including COVID-19 cases and deaths in California.

The UCSF Health Atlas visualizes data at the census tract level, and enables researchers to explore neighborhood-level characteristics and see how they relate.

“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 in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

“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 includes data at the census tract and county level for over 100 contextual characteristics across California. Reporting at the census tract level allows researchers to examine social determinants of health and relevant health outcomes from a local perspective.

Users can select and view characteristics, create custom areas to learn about specific geographies of interest, or explore and compare multiple scenarios at a time. Users can also download the map, histograms, and scatterplot for further analysis. For each characteristic, users can view the data source as well as an evidence-based explanation of its importance for health.

The website can also provide researchers with critical insights into the COVID-19 situation across the state.

“What we didn’t expect was that it would also provide a platform to explore social determinants of health as it relates to the COVID-19 epidemic in California,” said Riya Desai, a data analyst in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics who compiled the data and helped develop content for the site.

The website currently features data-driven stories on COVID-19, food security, housing insecurity, and other social determinants of health. The stories demonstrate how neighborhood-level characteristics impact health, and highlight how population health data can inform public health efforts to address care disparities.

The UCSF Health Atlas reports data from publicly available sources such as the American Community Survey from the Census Bureau, the 500 Cities Project from the CDC, and others. The website curates COVID-19 data from the Los Angeles Times.

Throughout the year, the project team will continue to develop the UCSF Health Atlas. COVID-19 data will be updated daily, enabling users to visualize cases in the context of neighborhood-level social determinants of health.

"In the wake of COVID pandemic, the population health perspective is more important than ever," said Courtney Lyles, co-Principal Investigator of the UCSF Population Health Data Initiative and Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

"We hope this public resource will be useful to UCSF researchers and the broader community to explore the role of place on health outcomes."

Other organizations have developed data visualization tools and interactive maps to examine the impact of COVID-19. Perhaps the most comprehensive and wide-ranging of these tools is the Johns Hopkins dashboard that tracks real-time data on confirmed coronavirus cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries.

“With the exception of Australia, Hong Kong, and Italy, the CSSE at Johns Hopkins University has reported newly infected countries ahead of WHO, with Hong Kong and Italy reported within hours of the corresponding WHO situation report,” Johns Hopkins researchers said.

“Given the popularity and impact of the dashboard to date, we plan to continue hosting and managing the tool throughout the entirety of the COVID-19 outbreak and to build out its capabilities to establish a standing tool to monitor and report on future outbreaks. We believe our efforts are crucial to help inform modelling efforts and control measures during the earliest stages of the outbreak.”