Acevedo-Garcia, D., McArdle, N., Shafer, L., & Noelke, C. The State of Racial/Ethnic Equity in Children’s Neighborhood Opportunity: First Findings from the Child Opportunity Index 3.0. diversitydatakids.org and Brandeis University.
https://www.diversitydatakids....hborhood-opportunity
The Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) has integrated theChild Opportunity Index into its Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS), a vast database of medical data from 49 children’s hospitals, with far-reaching results for child health research. Health and hospital researchers and administrators are increasingly focusing on neighborhoods as an important factor in inequities in child health and health care utilization. While many health leaders
understand the differences in neighborhood resources in the communities they serve, until recently there has been a lack of consistent, high-quality, accessible data quantifying neighborhood opportunity, limiting research possibilities. Health data is also often only available at the ZIP code level, while most neighborhood indices use census tracts to measure neighborhood wellbeing, which further complicates data integration. After launching the COI 2.0, diversitydatakids.org received many requests for ZIP code-level data, leading to our development of ZIP code estimates of the COI. We then built
on a partnership with the CHA to help their chief data scientist integrate the COI into the PHIS in 2021. Our data team presented on the COI to PHIS users at four different webinars and joined working groups to discuss how the COI is constructed, the advantages it offers and how to interpret associations found.
Since 2021, more than 90 papers have been written by health researchers across the country that use the COI to investigate the relationship between neighborhoods and child health outcomes and care usage. This research is adding to the evidence that neighborhood opportunity is related to complications arising from asthma and appendicitis, cardiovascular
health, emergency room utilization and length of inpatient stays, life expectancy and mortality—and much more.
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