The pandemic offers a chance to turn the tide for our country’s most vulnerable communities
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To those people who have devoted our professions to taking apart these inequities, the deep effect of COVID-19on neighborhoods of color was not a surprise. Throughout our country’s history, the very same disadvantaged groups suffer the most during natural disasters, wars, pandemics and other significant crises. And, when it comes to pandemics, we have actually never been successful in taking what we’ve learned to ensure resources reach those in biggest need. How do we accomplish a fair, proactive reaction when there’s not an equitable structure, blueprint or clear starting point?
Early on in the pandemic, the public health neighborhood realized that data availability– or the absence thereof– was a key issue. There have actually traditionally been challenges in data collection and reporting in these neighborhoods, the COVID-19 pandemic supplies an opportunity to turn the tide for our most vulnerable. As a country, we should focus on and invest in the function of data and innovation in closing the gap of disparities in results and in driving equitable access to testing, vaccines and delivery of health services.
Because its beginning, the Satcher Health Leadership Institute(SHLI) at Morehouse School of Medication in Atlanta has been a trailblazer in the health equity space. We then welcomed Google.org, Gilead Sciences and the Annie E. Casey Foundation to the table to help us understand what health equity data are already being gathered and to recognize the data spaces that currently exist.
Through this cross-sector collaborative process, we found out that if we can gather and clearly present the information, we can supply the basis for driving the response toward the areas in most require. The Health Equity Tracker Task was developed as a method to do simply that. Throughout the last 8 months, a group of Google.org fellows, including Google software engineers, item supervisors, UX scientists and designers, data analysts and more have been working with SHLI to determine and evaluate quality public data sources with the goal of producing an easy-to-use, public facing data platform that shows and contextualizes health disparities neighborhoods of color face throughout the U.S.
This Health Equity Tracker will map information on the trajectory of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccinations throughout the U.S., including its territories, broken down by race, ethnic background, gender, socioeconomic status and other important factors down to the county level, where readily available. The data, in turn, will assist policy makers, healthcare executives and magnate better understand how to ensure disproportionately affected neighborhoods receive the targeted resources and assistance they need, such as the creation of culturally relevant resources for community-based organizations to help build confidence and reinforce fair access to info associated to COVID-19 vaccines, to battle the virus and close racial spaces.
But the Health Equity Tracker Task is just one way in which information and innovation are helping neighborhoods of color hardest hit by COVID-19 We now understand enough to know there’s still more to be done.
We implore you to zoom out on your company to look at how you’re using innovation to reach your target audience, and how you may take advantage of those information and insights to help resolve one of the most pressing humanitarian concerns of our time. Through our work developing the Health Equity Tracker, we continue to find considerable gaps in race and ethnicity case data, and up until we have the complete image, we will not be able to truly understand and attend to the variations in the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Contact your local, state or federal representatives to advocate for centralized, extensive reporting on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, deaths and vaccines at the county level.
A nationwide method, continuous and significant investments, diverse working groups and federal policies are likewise essential to deepen the impact of the important work we’ve started. If we harness the power of information and innovation to address health injustices, building a transformative and inclusive reaction to COVID-19 is absolutely possible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR( S)
Daniel E. Dawes
Daniel E. Dawes, J.D., is the executive director of the Satcher Health Management Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, and author of The Political Determinants of Health
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