Lauren Eyler and Catherine Juillard Develop Algorithm to Facilitate Health Disparities Research

UCSF General Surgery Resident, Lauren Eyler, MD, MPH, in collaboration with UC Berkeley's Alan Hubbard, PhD and one of the Center's Co-Directors, Catherine Juillard, MD, MPH, worked together to develop an algorithm that facilitates health disparities research in the context of low- and middle-income countries. The algorithm can define population-specific models of economic status using variables from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) household assets data. The use of DHS data makes it easy to track the economic status of injured patients and to compare the economic status of injured patients with that of the general population. Using the algorithm allows investigators to track the economic status of injured patients over the course of interventions implemented to tackle injury disparities, for instance.

The algorithm has been incorporated into an R shiny app called the EconomicClusters App. The App was developed for use by investigators with limited statistical software coding experience.

To read more about the EconomicClusters App, please click here. At the link provided you can find more information about downloading the Mac and Windows versions of the App as well as the accompanying PowerPoint Presentation and the journal article.

To go straight to the folder containing the EconomicClusters App, the PowerPoint, and the journal article, please click here.