The University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine has launched the Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health to improve health outcomes for minority populations, those in economically challenged areas, and rural communities in Virginia. The center plans to utilize genomics, social determinants of health, clinical data, and other sources to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of human health and healthcare. This effort is part of UVA’s larger 10-year strategic plan to become the top public academic health system in the United States.
The University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine has recently announced the launch of its Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health. The center’s mission is to improve health outcomes for minority populations, those who live in economically challenged areas, and rural communities throughout Virginia. The UVA Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health intends to bring together expertise from UVA faculty members to promote health equity and address disparities within public health.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that public health infrastructure in the United States is not as robust as it should be. The creation of the center represents a vital step in the direction of addressing health disparities and promoting health equity. According to Keith L. Keene, Ph.D., professor of public health services at UVA and the center’s founding director, the pandemic has also shown that healthcare and public health cannot be approached from a one-size-fits-all perspective.
Keith Keene has spent a considerable amount of time researching genetic risk factors for complex diseases. His work is conducted in close collaboration with UVA’s Center for Public Health Genomics. Through the new Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health, Keene aims to connect genomics with population health.
The interdisciplinary center plans to integrate precision medicine by utilizing data from genomics, social determinants of health (SDOH), clinical data, and other sources such as the number of specialists in a geographic area or barriers to care access. This will help promote a more comprehensive understanding of human health and healthcare. By incorporating all these various data points, the center hopes to help patients achieve their health potential.
“We can then see how the biology and environment interplay to create the overall health profile of individuals,” Keene explained. “Then we can take it a step further and think about how we can bring in data such as anonymized electronic health records to give us a full picture of why certain individuals are more likely to have a particular disease or respond to a particular treatment.”
These efforts are a part of UVA’s larger 10-year strategic plan, which aims to become the top public academic health system in the United States by enhancing community outreach, significantly expanding access to care, and growing its biotech research enterprise. This is a critical step forward in improving public health and addressing disparities in healthcare in Virginia.
The creation of the UVA Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health is not the only example of how data analytics is being utilized to reduce and address health disparities. In January, the University of Notre Dame Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society and Accenture launched a collaboration designed to address community health challenges and identify care gaps through health equity data analytics.
The partnership will leverage the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society’s new Health Equity Data Lab to support the Accenture Health Equity Data project, in which researchers will evaluate the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to solve various healthcare challenges and target inequities. The partnership aims to help achieve better healthcare outcomes for minority populations, those who live in economically challenged areas, and rural communities throughout the United States.
The use of data analytics in healthcare is rapidly evolving, and the Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health at UVA is poised to play a significant role in this field. By utilizing data from various sources, the center hopes to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of human health and healthcare. This knowledge will be crucial in helping to address health disparities and promote health equity in Virginia and beyond.
