Place Matters, Community Matters
Where you live has an impact on your opportunity to live a long and healthy life, but this has little to do with where the pin drops on the map. Rather, it is the contours of each neighborhood–it’s DNA– that influences health. Every community has strengths, even those facing the most challenges. The Health Opportunity Index is designed to help residents identify which of the factors are supporting health opportunity in their communities and which may be holding them back. Our main dashboards allow communities to examine the HOI’s broad profiles–the chromosomes–that influence health. Our Profile dashboards dive deep into the profiles and allow communities to examine indicators–the genes–that may affect the opportunity to live a long and health life in each community.
The Wellness Disparity Profile
The HOI’s profiles were developed using statistical tools to identify related indicators. Two of those indicators, Access to Care and Segregation, make up the Wellness Disparity Profile, a measure of the disparate access to services in a community. This profile demonstrates the direct influence of social factors on the opportunity of all Virginians to live a long and healthy life.
1. Access to Care Indicator: Whether community members have access to a primary care physician and the means to pay for care. It includes the proportion of uninsured residents and the number of physicians within 30 miles of the community.
2. Segregation Indicator: A measure of whether and how much people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds live together in diverse communities. It includes measures of both community diversity and the distance between communities with different racial or ethnic profiles.
Use the dashboards below to explore the Wellness Disparity Profile and its indicators in your area.
A Closer Look
Health opportunity varies broadly across Virginia. It also varies significantly block by block and street by street within local health districts. Use the map below to examine the Wellness Disparity Profile at the Census Tract level in your community. Census Tracts are statistical areas created by the US Census Bureau that roughly equate to neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods with similar characteristics.
