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 California. 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 state, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to reveal that illness affects our communities in California 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 COVID-19 pandemic and other diseases and work toward a future where all Californians can be healthy.