The Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine today launched its Health Equity Tracker, a data platform that highlights the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on marginalized communities.

Built with support from Gilead Sciences, Google.org, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the CDC Foundation, the tracker is a data visualization tool that displays the scale of COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalizations across race and ethnicity, sex and age, from a whole-country view down to the county level.

What’s more, the Health Equity Tracker allows users to view different conditions and determinants that have led to unequal COVID-19 outcomes, including COPD, diabetes, poverty and uninsured rates. It can also be used to compare outcomes in different locations.

“COVID-19 has shown us the ugliness of racial health disparities in the United States,” Douglas Brooks, vice president of advancing Black equity and community engagement at Gilead Sciences, said during a press briefing for the tracker. “We’ve known these disparities exist for decades, and have seen communities newly devastated over the past year, but we haven’t been able to comprehensively track the data across the board.”

Eventually, the tracker will expand to include conditions such as mental and behavioral health, and additional determinants of health.

Google.org’s support came in the form of a $1.5 million donation, in addition to providing a team of more than 18 Google.org Fellows who worked across data analytics, engineering, product development, UX research and design support for the tracker.

As for Gilead, it provided $1 million to SHLI to help develop the tracker, and to create the Black Health Equity Alliance and the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Black, Hispanic and Asian patients had significantly higher rates of infection, hospitalization and death compared to their white counterparts, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The Health Equity Tracker’s developers created the tool to enable real policy change in response to these inequalities.

“Our goal is for the tracker to equip policymakers, public health officials, advocates, healthcare providers, leaders and community organizers with the resources and information they need to help shine a light on disparate outcomes,” Daniel Dawes, the executive director of SHLI, said during the press briefing.

“Our hope is that this will, in turn, lead to actionable, evidence-based policy changes that address the disproportionately impacted communities, who have for so long not received the resources and support they need.”

A key aspect of the tracker that the developers say is ripe for policy change is its focus on the significant data gaps that exist for vulnerable populations. For example, in Fulton, Georgia, where the Morehouse School of Medicine is located, only about 40% of COVID-19 cases had reported race and ethnicity data. Similar gaps exist across the country.

This signals the need for improved data collection and reporting standards, according to SHLI.

“If we had had tools like the Health Equity Tracker 40 years ago, we might’ve been able to act sooner, preventing the shameful disparities that we now see among people of color,” Brooks said. “This tracker has the potential to be that game-changer in the public health space to truly understand the problems we have down to the county level.”

THE LARGER TREND

The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the deeply rooted health inequalities that exist in the United States. It has prompted organizations across the health industry to advocate for and create change within their systems, as well as more broadly.

Specifically related to the racial and ethnicity data gaps, the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association and the American Pharmacists Association have called on the medical community to ramp up efforts to collect race and ethnicity information when administering COVID-19 vaccinations. They say this information will lead to an improved vaccination distribution process.

Even with improved data collection, structural inequalities, biases and racism can be easily encoded in data sets, according to an article recently published in The Lancet. It calls for better education and outreach among data scientists to prevent biased data.

Throughout the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination effort, many organizations have prioritized equity. For example, in California Blue Cross and Blue Shield is overseeing the vaccine rollout with an allocation algorithm that focuses on an equitable and efficient distribution.

CVS Health, Lyft and the YMCA have also teamed up to provide free rides to vaccination appointments, specifically focusing on vulnerable communities, including Black and Hispanic populations.

Within digital health, the family benefits platform Cleo recently launched a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative and Fitbit began a Health Equity Research Initiative, just to name a few.