About the Challenge

Announcements

Announcing the Winners of AHRQ's Visualization of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge

Announcing the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) Challenge Winner (Video: 1 minute, 28 seconds)

Alternative Audio-Described Version (1 minute, 28 seconds)

GRAND PRIZE WINNER $50,000: Mathematica

"Community Connector"

Mathematica's Community Connector is a visualization tool that facilitates community health and social determinants of health (SDOH) needs assessments. The tool is designed to help local community members and policymakers understand how SDOH are associated with health outcomes in their regions and foster collaboration between counties in areas such as peer-to-peer learning, sharing best practices, and engaging effective interventions.

The team used a combination of SDOH sources to create their winning entry, including American Community Survey, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Diabetes Atlas, Area Health Resource Files, Opportunity Atlas, Walk Score, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Colorado.gov (CDPHE). 

2ND PLACE $35,000: Salish Research Group

"Heat-Related Illness"

The Salish Research Group endeavored to address both the preparation and deployment phases of response to heat stress illness. Their Heat-Related Illness application enables a cascade of readiness events, including: 

• Development and deployment of heat shelters in areas of high heat-related illness (HRI) risk.
• Targeted contact for individuals known to be at high risk of HRI.
• Outreach maps for law enforcement to participate in wellness checks.
• Improved readiness of hospitals, emergency departments, and emergency medical services in areas of high HRI risk.
• Funding targeted to provide air conditioning for at-risk homes.
• Urban development to reduce heat island effects and improve canopy coverage in high HRI risk areas.

The team used several SDOH sources to develop their entry, including county-level incidence data from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment Public Health Tracking Portal, environmental data from Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium, American Community Survey, HRSA Area Health Resources File, and weather data from OpenWeatherMap.org.

3RD PLACE $15,000: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

"Mortality Minder"

The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Mortality Minder explores mortality trends for midlife adults ages 25-64 across the United States from 2000-2017. Users can identify social and economic factors associated with increased mortality trends at the county level for the Nation and individual States. Visualizations demonstrate determinants and their impact on mortality trends.

Sources used by the team include Wonder.CDC.org and CountHealthRankings.org from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Congratulations to Our Phase 1 Semifinalists!

AHRQ has selected 12 semifinalists from Phase 1 of the AHRQ Visualization Resources of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge.

Each Phase 1 semifinalist was awarded $10,000 and will move on to Phase 2 to develop their prototype.

The list below is ordered alphabetically by semifinalist's name/entity.

Challenge Overview Webinar

The AHRQ Visualization Resources of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge team held a webinar on Wednesday, April 10, 2019, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. (ET) to share information and answer questions about the challenge competition.

Visualization Resources of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) Challenge (Video: 27 minutes, 58 seconds)

You may also wish to review the Frequently Asked Questions.

Video Message from AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna About Entering the Challenge

Watch AHRQ Director Gopal Khanna discuss the $220,000 challenge to develop tools to predict and meet health service delivery needs in communities.

(Video: 2 minutes, 24 seconds)

Challenge Purpose:

Significant disparities persist among many U.S. subpopulations in their receipt of quality health care. Further, there are multiple social factors that contribute to poor quality care and increased health care spending.

This challenge is consistent with HHS Secretary Azar's goal of increasing value-based care by leveraging technology and providing innovative tools to help organizations improve their understanding of factors that contribute to poor quality care and address unmet community health service delivery needs. Evidence has suggested that using data on social determinants of health¹ (SDOH) and community services may help AHRQ and others better plan for the use of limited resources, improve population health outcomes, and drive savings.

Challenge Goal:

The AHRQ Visualization Resources of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge seeks tools that support visualizing such data clusters to enhance the research and analysis of community-level health services.

Challenge participants must develop visualization tools that can augment the insights drawn from the analysis of medical expenditure and health care utilization data at the community level. Tools must use publicly available and free SDOH data from at least three of the following data sources:

• Federal databases.
• State databases.
• Other locally available data sources, such as SDOH data from voice, digital, and social medical requests via service lines, for example--
  • 911 emergency services.
  • 311 non-emergency requests for community services.
  • 211 personal referrals for community services.

A list of these resources are provided on the AHRQ Challenge website. These tools should be constructed and presented so that AHRQ can apply them in at least two of the following areas:

• Develop studies (data linkage, machine learning, and modeling).
• Relate initial consumer health-seeking behavior.
• Evaluate health status.
• Predict needs for emergency, hospital, and community health care services.

^1.Healthy People 2020 defines social determinants of health as the conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Conditions (e.g., social, economic, and physical) in these various environments and settings (e.g., school, church, workplace, and neighborhood) have been referred to as "place." In addition to the more material attributes of "place," the patterns of social engagement and sense of security and well-being are also affected by where people live. Resources that enhance quality of life can have a significant influence on population health outcomes. Examples of these resources include safe and affordable housing, access to education, public safety, availability of healthy foods, local emergency/health services, and environments free of life-threatening toxins.