New tool collects and analyzes data on health disparities in the U.S.

A new tool puts health disparity data in the public’s hands A new tool called the Health Equity Tracker collects, analyzes, and makes visible data on health disparities entrenched in U.S. medicine. Katie Palmer STAT

Over and over, the pandemic has reinforced the reality of racial disparities in the U.S. health system. But that story remains difficult to see in the data, which is still inconsistently collected and reported across the country.

On Wednesday, a coalition of researchers and advocates launched a tool they hope will fill some of those gaps: the Health Equity Tracker, a portal that collects, analyzes, and makes visible data on some of the inequities entrenched in U.S. medicine.

“For far too long it’s been ‘no data, no problem,’” said Nelson Dunlap, chief of staff at the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, which developed the tool with funding and resources from Google.org, Gilead Sciences, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and CDC Foundation. By making data that do exist on racial health disparities accessible, the tracker aims to empower local advocates to drive change in their communities — and inspire action to fill in holes in data that are themselves reinforced by structural racism. In the tracker’s display, 38% of federally-collected Covid-19 cases report unknown race and ethnicity.

Those gaps are exemplified by the winding path the group had to take to access its Covid-19 data. At its inception, the tracker used state-reported race and ethnicity data collected by the Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project — a foundation-funded, volunteer-driven effort that, in the absence of a strong, public-facing federal data effort, became a de facto data authority after launching in March 2020; it started tracking race and ethnicity the next month.

It wasn’t until late 2020 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started releasing detailed Covid-19 case surveillance data to a limited pool of applicants, a county-level database that drives the Health Equity Tracker today. “We got access to it in late December, early January,” said Larry Adams, a Google.org fellow working on the project. “Which was serendipitous because Covid Tracking Project stopped publishing their data in early March.” ...