Background

A team from UCSF School of Medicine Dean’s Office of Population Health and Health Equity, led by Dr. Debby Oh, hired us to build an online tool to help researchers explore how our environment influences our health at a local level across the United States. The goal of the project was to give researchers new insights into the social determinants of health.

What we made

The Health Atlas was designed with health researchers, policy makers, and community advocates in mind to allow exploration of over a hundred social determinants of health and health metrics across the state at the census tract and county levels. On top of this interface is a series of data stories that help bring this work to life, illuminating issues like food and housing insecurity across the country, state by state, and neighborhood by neighborhood.

The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to reveal that illness affects our communities in the United States unequally. It’s clear that rates of infection and death affect people differently due to a multitude of socioeconomic and environmental factors. We hope that the Health Atlas can help us better understand the inequities underlying the health and wellbeing of all Americans.