VUMC’s Office of Health Equity (OHE) facilitates the annual Health Equity Innovation Awards to support innovative ideas and solutions to advance health equity, with the goal of ultimately improving health outcomes for impacted communities.
This year, VUMC’s Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROM) team received a Health Equity Innovation Award for their proposal, "Visualizing Health Equity through Patient-Reported Health Status.” The award will provide $10,000 to fund time with Enterprise Analytics so the PROM team can add health equity visualizations to PROM Tableau dashboards.
A major challenge in advancing health equity is the lack of quality-of-life metrics, such as PROMs in clinical data. PROMs are surveys that provide standardized assessments of health status in the form of numerical scores. These data points can be used to compare quality of life and physical function among patient populations.
The new PROM Health Equity Dashboard will display PROM data across age, gender and racial/ethnic groups. It will also merge patient zip codes with census data, allowing for the integration of rural status, estimated income and a neighborhood deprivation index into the visualization. The new dashboard will provide a powerful tool for clinicians to identify disparities in health status, allowing for interventions to help mitigate these disparities.
Work on the new visualization will begin in March or April 2021, and it should be complete before the end of the fiscal year.