Geographic Visualization of Mortality in the United States as Related to Healthcare Access by County

This investigation analyzed the impact of place-based inequities on mortality rates in 2014. The team combined mortality data with metrics on health care accessibility, socioeconomic deprivation, and other variables available from publicly available data sets. The investigation team created a centralized database for visualizations that combined mortality data by diagnosis, socioeconomic data, health resource data, and an index of area deprivation. Choropleth maps, scatterplots, and regression analyses were performed to identify the major areas of mortality and how well different measures of the social determinants of health (SDOH) correlate to mortality data. A bivariate color scheme to visually capture both outcomes and SDOH in a choropleth map was shown to be a compact and novel manner to display complex epidemiologic data.