Morehouse School of Medicine
Employing America’s Health Rankings API to Advance Health Equity
In an increasingly data driven world, Morehouse School of Medicine’s Health Equity Tracker is providing public health stakeholders with the crucial information they need to make decisions that center health equity.
The Health Equity Tracker is a resource for policymakers, community leaders and researchers to provide them with data to make informed decisions that advance health equity and justice for all. The platform was initially created in 2020 to monitor the prevalence of COVID-19 cases. Since then, the Health Equity Tracker has taken a broader approach to focus on topics related to the political and social determinants of health.
Expanding Reach
Using data to drive innovative solutions forward
As the Health Equity Tracker expanded its reach, it turned to America’s Health Rankings Application Programming Interface (API) to access data among demographic groups and measures of chronic disease, mental health and social determinants of health. The abundance of data provided by the API and integrated into the tracker helps fill a gap for policymakers and stakeholders looking to identify inequities and use data to drive innovative solutions forward.
America’s Health Rankings contains national and state-level data gathered from over 80 reputable publicly available sources, which are integrated into the Health Equity Tracker through the API. It also provides a wide range of public health measures and breaks down data by demographics including age, race and sex. According to Morehouse School of Medicine Software Engineer Eric Warren, the API is the first that taps into extensive, relevant data that meets a critical goal for the Tracker.
"The API is one of the most comprehensive datasets that we're able to use. It has a lot of different measures that we want to display on the site, and it really covers the breadth of the different topics on the API that we can showcase on the Health Equity Tracker."
Morehouse School of Medicine engineers worked closely with the America's Health Rankings team to optimize the API so it could easily incorporate data into the Health Equity Tracker. Warren added that the API tool’s pre-formatting is unrivaled and provides critical value to the public health community.
"The America’s Health Rankings API is a powerful tool, tapping into a diverse range of health measures that are relevant to our Health Equity Tracker. Working with the API so far has been an easy process and I look forward to using it more! There’s nothing to even compare it to."
Using Visuals to Tell Digestible Data-Driven Stories
The Health Equity Tracker also utilizes data from the API to create compelling visuals that illustrate the impacts of political and social determinants on health outcomes. Visuals tell digestible data-driven stories to highlight differences in health among various communities of interest.
The Health Equity Tracker has received positive feedback from public health stakeholders, including higher education institutions and epidemiologists, and is being actively shared at conferences and events. The Health Equity Tracker continues to use API data as a resource to build a scalable, feature-rich platform that supports their mission to address health disparities in the United States by identifying at-risk populations and highlighting data inequities.