The health equity explorer: An open-source resource for distributed health equity visualization and research across common data models
Open accessAbstract
Introduction: There is an urgent need to address pervasive inequities in health and healthcare in the USA. Many areas of health inequity are well known, but there remain important unexplored areas, and for many populations in the USA, accessing data to visualize and monitor health equity is difficult. Methods: We describe the development and evaluation of an open-source, R-Shiny application, the “Health Equity Explorer (H2E),” designed to enable users to explore health equity data in a way that can be easily shared within and across common data models (CDMs). Results: We have developed a novel, scalable informatics tool to explore a wide variety of drivers of health, including patient-reported Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), using data in an OMOP CDM research data repository in a way that can be easily shared. We describe our development process, data schema, potential use cases, and pilot data for 705,686 people who attended our health system at least once since 2016. For this group, 996,382 unique observations for questions related to food and housing security were available for 324,630 patients (at least one answer for all 46% of patients) with 65,152 (20.1% of patients with at least one visit and answer) reporting food or housing insecurity at least once. Conclusions: H2E can be used to support dynamic and interactive explorations that include rich social and environmental data. The tool can support multiple CDMs and has the potential to support distributed health equity research and intervention on a national scale.
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Emerging platforms such as the Sociome Data Commons and Health Equity Explorer offer harmonized geospatial datasets and scalable informatics tools to support community-level interventions and policy development.
“Emerging platforms such as the Sociome Data Commons and Health Equity Explorer exemplify this shift, offering harmonized geospatial datasets and scalable informatics tools to support community-level interventions and policy development [65,66].”
From Then, Now, Next: Unpacking the Shifting Trajectory of Social Determinants of Health (2025) · cites this paper as [66]
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- Authors
- Adams, W. G., Gasman, S., Beccia, A. L., & Fuentes, L.
- Affiliations
- Boston University (US)
- Boston Medical Center (US)
- Boston Children's Hospital (US)
- Corresponding author
- Adams, William G.
- Venue
- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2024
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- e72-e72
- ISSN
- 2059-8661 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC11058576
- OpenAlex
- W4393987702
- Cited by
- 6
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4
- FWCI
- 2.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- OpenBU (Boston University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (UL1TR001430)
- National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Health › Health disparities and outcomes
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Electronic Health Records Systems
- Social Sciences › Health › Public Health and Social Inequalities
- Keywords
- health equity, social determinants of health, R Shiny application, common data model, OMOP CDM, data visualization, food insecurity, housing insecurity, health system data, open source software
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