Data and Technology Can Help Us Make Progress on COVID Inequities

Since its inception, the Satcher Health Leadership Institute (SHLI) at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta has been a trailblazer in the health equity space. As we began exploring ways to overcome the data problem, we partnered with the CDC Foundation to bring diverse leaders to the table to form the Health Equity Task Force.

We then invited Google.org, Gilead Sciences and the Annie E. Casey Foundation to the table to help us understand what health equity data are already being collected and to identify the data gaps that currently exist.Through this cross-sector collaborative process, we learned that if we can collect and clearly present the data, we can provide the basis for driving the response toward the areas in most need.

The Health Equity Tracker Project was created as a way to do just that. During the last eight months, a team of Google.org fellows, including Google software engineers, product managers, UX researchers and designers, data analysts and more have been working with SHLI to identify and analyze quality public data sources with the goal of creating an easy-to-use, public facing data platform that displays and contextualizes health disparities communities of color face throughout the U.S.

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