All populations need healthcare, and demographic analysis defines those populations. Uses of demographic data in healthcare include determining how to deliver healthcare, how to talk about it, how to improve it, where to position it, and how to anticipate it.
Getting demographic data, however, isn’t always easy. The U.S. Census Bureau is the nation’s premier collector of demographic data, but its data – literally billions and billions of data points – can be unwieldy and difficult to use. Fortunately, there are options – like Social Explorer, an award-winning demographic mapping software that allows users to customize reports and maps that are based on Census data.
We’ll discuss several uses of demographic data in healthcare, considering both community needs, such as assessing the overall health of an area, locating facilities, and predicting future use, and individual needs, such as communications and outcomes. To be sure, there are hundreds of health-related data sources, but demographics – the quantifiable study of populations – is foundational for all of them.
Community Uses of Demographic Data in Healthcare
Although individuals are patients, or consumers of healthcare, demographic data should also be used to assess community needs, too. Businesses, nonprofits, and public health policy researchers use demographic data to determine needs within communities, such as locations for healthcare facilities and potential future areas of focus.
Here, we’ll look at two uses of demographic data in healthcare for community study: Location and forecasting. While these variables may appear most relevant to businesses, researchers, and policymakers, bear in mind that this type of population health data can also be a crucial factor in determining the health of different populations.
Use Case 1: Healthcare facility location
As with real estate, location is everything in determining where to establish a healthcare facility, whether it’s a solo general family practice or a Level IV trauma center. Knowing the age of potential patients can be a key driver of location.
The American Community Survey has detailed age breakdowns by sex, race, and ethnicity, as well as median ages for almost every standard geography, ranging from state-level to Census block group, or neighborhood level. It also offers incremental age groupings, such as the number of people who are 5 to 9 years old or 80 to 84 years old.
While many healthcare facilities such as hospitals will accept patients of any age, some establishments may be more focused, such as pediatric hospitals, nursing homes, or sports medicine clinics. Knowing the differences in demographics in an area can spell the difference between a struggling practice and a thriving one.
Here’s an example of how demographic data could be used to identify the median age groups of every neighborhood in Iowa:
Use Case 2: Forecasting
If you build it, they will come – but how do healthcare businesses and policymakers know where to position facilities for the greatest possible benefit? Access to healthcare, while not a right in the United States, can be a key determinant of economic health in an area. Simply put, people are not likely to move to an area where healthcare is not available.
While regulators often control whether healthcare facilities are built, few establishments will consider moving into or expanding in an area where the population is shrinking. Social Explorer tools allow users to view growth within specific geographic areas over different periods of time and gauge their suitability for new or expanded healthcare facilities.
There’s no shortage of companies offering demographic projections, but the most reliable data is historical. Social Explorer allows users to customize tables and maps to see where populations have grown or fallen over previous three- and five-year increments.
Individual Uses of Demographic Data in Healthcare
Healthcare is often thought of as a community project. Those communities, however, are made up of individuals. And while the Census Bureau doesn’t release data on individuals, its data can be used to determine many of the characteristics of individuals living within a given community.
Here, we’ll look at three uses of demographic data in healthcare for individual study: Billing, communications, and outcomes, or variables that can be used to identify specific cohorts. Again, it bears emphasizing that demographic data is only one of many data sources that can be used in healthcare, but it’s one of the most important.
(It’s important to underscore that the Census Bureau has been absolute in protecting the privacy of its data. Individual records haven’t been released – period. So when we discuss individual uses, we’re talking about demographic data that can be used to assess characteristics of individual cohorts of people, not individual people.)
Use Case 3: Billing
Anyone who’s ever received a healthcare bill eventually understands one thing about healthcare bills: You’re not meant to understand them. The U.S. healthcare system is a $4.9 trillion system, accounting for almost $1 of every $6 worth of goods and services produced and consumed in the country.
Healthcare bills do have one thing in common, though: Their amounts are invariably determined by your type of insurance. In other words, there’s one bill for people who have coverage under Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly. There’s another bill for people who get coverage under Medicaid, the joint federal-state program for children, the disabled, and elderly. There’s another variation for people who don’t have insurance. And for people who have employer-sponsored or private insurance, there are literally hundreds of permutations, depending on the insurance company or marketplace plan.
The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey can bring some degree of focus into the issue. A business geared to serving the elderly community, for example, might reconsider setting up shop in a county with a low number of Medicare and/or Medicaid recipients. On the other hand, a family practice might consider a zip code with a high percentage of people covered by employer-based health insurance to be a good bet.
Social Explorer has consolidated several Census tables to demonstrate the prevalence of public and private health insurance, as well as the number of individuals without health insurance:
Use Case 4: Patient Communications
Most physicians and healthcare providers understand that medical treatment without communication isn’t really treatment at all. But not all communications are equal in a diverse population. Different populations often will benefit most from different approaches that are tailored to age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
Consider, for example, the Internet, which has revolutionized much of healthcare. While telemedicine has its limitations, healthcare providers have been increasing their online presences to include everything from scheduling appointments to billing.
The Internet may be ubiquitous in our media, but it’s far from omnipresent in the United States, especially in its most potent, high-speed forms. Almost 7.3 million of the 127.5 million U.S. households don’t have an Internet connection; another 192,000 are using a dial-up connection.
Healthcare-related businesses would do well to consider using tools like Social Explorer to gauge the level of online connectivity in their region. It does very little good to create and maintain an expensive online presence if only a few people are able to take advantage of it.
Use Case 5: Outcomes
Improving peoples’ healthcare is the Holy Grail of the medical community. But to solve health issues, they first have to be diagnosed. And to diagnose issues, it’s often helpful to understand their prevalence.
Diabetes, for example, is a major issue in the United States. As many as 1 in 7 Americans have the disease, and it has become especially prevalent among obese people. Because obesity is often tied to poverty – which is often exacerbated by living in areas with fewer choices for healthy food and safe physical activity – it makes sense for conscientious health providers to consider the population in a given area that participates in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps.
Another issue that might escape scrutiny without demographic awareness is the prevalence of service-connected disabilities. While armed conflicts haven’t stopped, battlefield medicine has made enormous strides over the last half-century, and many wartime injuries that were once fatal are now survivable. A 2014 Congressional Budget Office report found more than 50,000 U.S. service members were wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan. The ACS compiles data on the number of people with service-connected disabilities by percentage rating:
While all humans are alike, decades of study have highlighted health disparities among different races and ethnicities. African-American children, for example, have a 260 percent greater rate of emergency room visits, 250 percent greater hospitalization rates, and 500 percent higher death rates from asthma than white children. Hispanic women have rates of cervical cancer that are twice those of white, non-Hispanic women. Asian-American women have higher-than-average rates of tuberculosis, and hepatitis B; Vietnamese-American women report cervical cancer rates that are five times those of white women.
Having the ability to identify race and ethnicities within a given health service area can give providers information about questions to ask and procedures to order. Social Explorer’s customizable, easy-to-use table and mapping tools allow users to study race and ethnicity down to a zip code or neighborhood level.
Final Thoughts on Uses of Demographic Data in Healthcare
The healthcare field has become increasingly data-driven. There are hundreds if not thousands of applicable data sets for almost every aspect of the $4.9 trillion industry, ranging from prices charged for individual DRGs (diagnostic-related codes, used primarily in billing) to the costs of organ donor transplants by medical region.
Demographics, however, is the most foundational type of data that can be used in healthcare. It defines current and potential patient populations, issues that may be relevant to specific populations, and areas where new or expanded healthcare facilities can best be located.
Social Explorer’s customizable, easy-to-use interface allows users to create tabular and/or map-based reports, based on billions of different Census data points. The award-winning demographic mapping software requires little in the way of technical or programming knowledge – only ideas for providing better healthcare.