The National Institutes of Health recently announced a new tool – the Neighborhood Atlas – designed to provide details about socioeconomic data at the community level. As NIH explained, seeing a neighborhood’s socioeconomic measures, such as income, education, employment and housing quality, may provide clues to the effects of those factors on overall health.

The Neighborhood Atlas is housed at the University of Wisconsin. The initiative is funded by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), both part of the NIH.

“Socioeconomic disadvantage is one of the fundamental factors that result in health disparities; and understanding those factors is what will lead to development of interventions to reduce disparities,” said Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, MD director of NIMHD. “Having a tool to better understand social factors impacting health disparities is an important step forward to achieving health equity.”

The Atlas uses an “Area Deprivation Index,” which encompasses 17 measures of education, housing quality and poverty, updated with U.S. census survey data. Users can download maps indexed with measures of neighborhood disadvantage, ranging from nationally to the local level. 

NIH touts the Atlas as a tool that can help researchers, policy makers and healthcare professionals study social-biological factors in health and disease, develop or study the impact of health policy or better align resources.