Abstract P081: Applying Precision Public Health Tools to Address Health Disparities Among African-Americans in Alachua County, Florida

Abstract

Precision Public Health (PPH) is the application of public health tools to population subsets with tailored interventions resulting in quantitative improvements in overall population health. The goal of PPH is to move from general impact to specific impact with interventions while maintaining a population focus in our outcomes. Precision Public Health at the University of Florida (PPH@UF) is a multi-disciplinary workgroup established in 2017 for the purpose of pursuing PPH practices. The primary product of the workgroup is the PPH@UF Libguide: a PPH focused tool designed to be a single place for public health workers to find necessary resources they need to understand their community and create effective interventions. Using the resources in this tool can help existing or new public health workers and researchers move from general population analysis towards precision in their interpretation of the data. This poster has two goals: 1) To show how the resources from the PPH@UF Libguide can be used to address health disparities among African-Americans in Alachua County and 2) To provide an example of how a PPH tool can increase the precision in population analysis aimed toward recommending interventions. The study utilized the PPH@UF Libguide to investigate a commonly known disparity between African-American and Caucasian diabetes deaths in Alachua County. By translating demographic data and investigating diabetes hospitalization, prevalence of diabetes by age over time, and population characteristics of relevant census tracts in Alachua County, we identified two specific census tracts that have significantly higher density of these individuals at risk. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and presented by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we were also able to observe that these tracts had very high rates of annual doctor visits but very low insurance rates and few locally available core preventative services. This indicates that interventions focusing on preventative care outside of doctor’s offices and connecting individuals to currently available community resources may be most helpful. The PPH@UF Libguide includes many different community partners who would be able to supply these types of resources and can serve not only as a research tool but also as a way to sort community health providers. Any intervention would include training individuals to access information on the PPH@UF Libguide for the needs of community members. By identifying a major community issue and providing a more precise geographic scope, supportive and integrated data, and a practical focus, the PPH@UF Libguide shows its ability to make efforts to address disparities among African-Americans in our community more effective. In conclusion, community health workers and advocates can utilize PPH tools similar to the PPH@UF Libguide to increase the impact and value of their community interventions.