A new data tool measures the COVID-19 preparedness of all 3,007 counties in the U.S.
The Health Preparedness Score is a combination of factors measured in local healthcare infrastructure.
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The continued spread of COVID-19 across the United States has prompted experts to consider the pandemic’s effect on major cities and rural communities alike.
The healthcare infrastructure of each state is unequally equipped to meet the challenge that the virus poses. Examining the problem at a deeper level, even the counties within each state can have varying preparedness.
To help government officials and the public better understand this concept, STAT recently tried to encompass a massive amount of health infrastructure data into an informative tool called the Health Preparedness Score.
The score itself is a rating between one and 100 that measures a particular county’s readiness to meet the COVID-19 threat. The attributes that determine the score are wide-ranging, including the number of hospital beds within a 40-minute drive, local medical staff, socioeconomic and demographic indicators, as well as models specific to the expected spread of COVID-19.
Francesco Marconi, the founder and chief data officer at Applied XL, which worked in partnership with STAT on the project along with the Center on Rural Innovation, believes getting information on each county illuminates an aspect of the pandemic’s effect that hasn’t been talked about as much. (Disclosure: STAT and Boston.com are both part of Boston Globe Media Partners.)
“The information is very relevant because we have a lot of statistics for states and even cities like New York and Boston,” Marconi explained, “but we didn’t really have enough information at the county level, specifically around rural areas, which are often underserved in terms of the healthcare infrastructure.”
Examining publicly available data on 3,007 counties across the country, Marconi and his colleagues found that the best way to “normalize” the data was to put it in a searchable dashboard:
“I think the biggest or perhaps the most surprising finding is that two counties might be right next to each other and have completely different preparedness scores,” Marconi said. “That means that we can’t really say that the U.S. is either well prepared or it isn’t. It’s really not simple in terms of the level of preparedness.
“We also were really interested in shedding light in what’s happening in rural areas,” Marconi continued. “We found that although rural areas are typically seen as having less health care infrastructure, we found that there are big cities that have equal levels of unpreparedness.”
For Marconi, tools like this illustrate the importance of data in not only raising general awareness of important issues, but in facilitating rational governmental decisions.
“There is an explosion of data out there that is really helpful in keeping the public informed and to help public officials make decisions,” Marconi noted.
Applied XL will work in partnership with The Boston Globe and STAT from April 24-26 to host a virtual hackathon for those with data-oriented ideas on how to help with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
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