About
Finding data about the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and community context is tough. The data is often scattered, hard to find, and takes time to learn how to use, especially when it involves integrating geospatial data and then transforming for analysis and communications. The SDOH & Place Project was created to make this process easier. A human-centered design approach centers everything we do around the diverse range of people who need access to this critical SDOH data.
With a multidisciplinary team, we’ve crafted multiple resources to help researchers and advocates to explore and understand SDOH data and generate high impact research and advocacy centered in health equity. This includes resources like:
Data offline? You’ll be linked to the SDOH Data Refuge, a collaborative directory that retains copies of critical federal data.
The SDOH & Place Project adopts cutting edge spatial data science to support discovery but at its core, the SDOH & Place Project takes a community-driven approach, focusing on real-world impacts and making sure the process of working with this data and making new data applications is open and inclusive. We prioritize collaboration between the people who collect the data, those who analyze it, and the communities it represents. By simplifying access and building shared understanding, the SDOH & Place Project aims to drive better decisions and more equitable health outcomes.
The project is based at the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with support provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Please note: the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
The Healthy Regions & Policies Lab also manages the US Covid Atlas, ChiVes: the Chicago Environment Visualization Explorer, and the Opioid Environment Policy Scan Ecosystem (OEPS). For more details on HeRoP's research on the social and spatial determinants of health, check out their Lab page.
With a multidisciplinary team, we’ve crafted multiple resources to help researchers and advocates to explore and understand SDOH data and generate high impact research and advocacy centered in health equity. This includes resources like:
- Learning how to make your own dashboard with free GIS tools centered around SDOH, community context, and health equity using the Community Toolkit.
- Discovering the details of nearly five dozen SDOH datasets for all U.S. communities by topic, place, or time period, with or without AI support, with the Data Discovery search tool.
- Research guides to dive into the details of measuring community-level SDOH concepts.
- A new toolkit walking you through the key points of human-centered design as a method for engaging communities when developing apps.
Data offline? You’ll be linked to the SDOH Data Refuge, a collaborative directory that retains copies of critical federal data.
The SDOH & Place Project adopts cutting edge spatial data science to support discovery but at its core, the SDOH & Place Project takes a community-driven approach, focusing on real-world impacts and making sure the process of working with this data and making new data applications is open and inclusive. We prioritize collaboration between the people who collect the data, those who analyze it, and the communities it represents. By simplifying access and building shared understanding, the SDOH & Place Project aims to drive better decisions and more equitable health outcomes.
The project is based at the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with support provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Please note: the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
The Healthy Regions & Policies Lab also manages the US Covid Atlas, ChiVes: the Chicago Environment Visualization Explorer, and the Opioid Environment Policy Scan Ecosystem (OEPS). For more details on HeRoP's research on the social and spatial determinants of health, check out their Lab page.
The SDOH & Place Project provides access to spatially indexed and curated databases, specifically designed for conducting health equity research. We will achieve this goal by:
- Developing and disseminating a toolkit on integrating User-Centered Design principles in place-based web applications.
- Creating an innovative product for place-based data discovery to link data needed for app development and related neighborhood health data exploration.
Our mission is to make the process of building web applications that support community health by being more accessible, enjoyable, and empowering.
