Taking a close look at data from 150 neighborhoods in Durham County, researchers from the Duke University School of Medicine and Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai documented in a first-of-its-kind study that indicators of structural racism in residential neighborhoods, including higher area deprivation and reported violent crimes, are linked to health. The social data came from multiple sources, including the Durham Neighborhood Compass, an interactive website that anyone can use to track the health and other characteristics of neighborhoods.
Inspired by the Neighborhood Compass, Nrupen Bhavsar, PhD, worked with colleagues at Duke CTSI — including Jessica Sperling, PhD, director of evaluation and strategic planning — to create the Social, Environmental, and Equity Drivers (SEED) Health Atlas. This publicly available platform was created to provide a resource for researchers and community members to learn more about social drivers of health in Durham and surrounding counties, access local data, and promote research in health disparities and equity.
Supported by CTSI, the goal of the SEED Atlas is to enable users to learn more about the factors that influence health in Durham. The platform has expanded to include data from the entire country to enable collaborations across institutions.
Bhavsar and Sperling are contributing to the new Duke Center for Precision Health (CPH) as well. Bhavsar is a member of the Education Program, and Sperling is a member of the Translational Omics and Biomarkers Program. The CPH is a collaboration between CTSI and the Precision Genomics Collaboratory to harness the power of genomic, biomarker, and health data to transform patient care and population health.
Read the School of Medicine article and the journal publication.