The UCSF School of Medicine Dean’s Office of Population Health and Health Equity is excited to announce the release of UCSF Health Atlas, a new, interactive population health mapping website that curates publicly available data and visualizes it at the census tract level. The UCSF Health Atlas (healthatlas.ucsf.edu), which will enable researchers to explore neighborhood-level characteristics and see how they relate, also includes regularly updated information on COVID-19 cases and deaths in California.

“The vision was to provide researchers an easy-to-use tool to explore what factors can impact health on a population level,” said Debby Oh, Health Atlas project lead and epidemiologist in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. “We wanted to provide beautiful maps, well-informed and well-written content, the ability to pool geographies, a comparison of variables, and downloadable data.”

In an effort to encourage UCSF researchers to consider population health principles in their research, education, and clinical care, Health Atlas includes data at the census tract and county level for over 100 contextual characteristics across California. Reporting at the census tract level affords researchers a local perspective from which to examine various domains of social determinants of health, as well as relevant health outcomes.

Health Atlas users can easily select and view characteristics, create custom areas to learn about specific geographies of interest, or explore and compare multiple scenarios at once. The map, histograms and scatterplot give users a quick sense of the data distribution, which can also be downloaded for further analysis. For each characteristic, users can view the data source and an evidence-based explanation of its importance for health.

Though development took nine months, current events added an unexpected element of urgency to the project.

“What we didn’t expect was that it would also provide a platform to explore social determinants of health as it relates to the COVID-19 epidemic in California,” said Riya Desai, a data analyst in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics who compiled the data and helped develop content for the site.

Health Atlas currently features data-driven stories on COVID-19, food security, housing insecurity, and cancer in Latinx enclaves. Drawing on efforts by UCSF’s own EatSF, the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and DREAM Lab, the stories illustrate how neighborhood-level characteristics impact health and highlight how population health data can inform frontline public health efforts to address health disparities.

The UCSF Health Atlas reports data from publicly available sources such as the American Community Survey from the Census Bureau, the 500 Cities Project from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many others. COVID-19 case data comes from the Los Angeles Times, whose reporters are doing the critical work of gathering case data from over 60 different health departments in the state on a daily basis.

"In the wake of COVID pandemic, the population health perspective is more important than ever," said Courtney Lyles, co-Principal Investigator of the UCSF Population Health Data Initiative and Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics. "We hope this public resource will be useful to UCSF researchers and the broader community to explore the role of place on health outcomes."

The project team plans to continue site development throughout the year. Data on COVID-19 will be updated on a daily basis, allowing users to visualize cases in the context of neighborhood-level social determinants of health.

Health Atlas was developed by the UCSF project team (Debby Oh, Riya Desai, Mindy DeRouen, Alice Fishman, Salma Shariff-Marco, Scarlett Gomez, Jessica Fields, Courtney Lyles, and Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo) in collaboration with Stamen Design, a data visualization firm based in San Francisco, and Plain Language Health.