Five years in the making and available at no charge, the Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project Monograph gives officials and researchers for the first time a systematic way to monitor health disparities across a wide range of outcomes using basic socioeconomic information.
Most national health disease databases fail to include critical information about people’s jobs, incomes, education, and assets—despite how powerfully these factors influence well-being. Why? The sources from which the databases are drawn, such as cancer registries and notifiable disease surveillance systems, do not collect socioeconomic data. The shortfall leaves public health officials disadvantaged when investigating why some groups of people suffer worse health than others.
“Social inequalities in health, however real, can be ignored and made invisible if the data to document them are not collected,” said Nancy Krieger, principal investigator of the project and an associate professor in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
Working in cooperation with the public health departments of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the HSPH team sifted through reams of public health and census records to determine two things: what kind of socioeconomic information--when applied to what kind of group--would consistently tell officials something useful about health disparities. The answers could prompt public health officials to rethink their usual approaches to monitoring health inequalities.