JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

COVID-19 is impacting people across the globe and is currently a leading cause of death in many countries. Globally, as of February 26, 2021, there were over 113 million confirmed cases and more than 2.5 million deaths. Underlying factors e.g., Social Determinants of Health could contribute to these statistics. Albeit COVID-19 is impacting people's lives in many aspects, it is disproportionally impacting certain groups and populations. Our prior work has explored associations between social determinants of health (SDoH) and several health outcomes (e.g., Asthma, Obesity). Our findings reinforce the emerging consensus that SDoH factors should be considered when implementing intelligent public health surveillance solutions to inform public health policies and interventions.

Objective:

This study first reviews and examines scientific literature regarding COVID-19 and associated social-environmental determinants of health and defines their group-level indicators. Then we classify these indicators according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) taxonomy. Secondly, it provides a blueprint and implements a prototype for an intelligent Urban Population Health Observatory (UPHO) platform that integrates the classified group-level indicators related to social determinants of health to the individual and aggregate level population health data to empower urban health surveillance and support COVID-19 pandemic preparedness, response, and management. UPHO aims to help decision-makers to design mitigating interventions and address disparities in COVID-19 disease burden and access to health services (e.g. testing centers, vaccine distribution, etc.).

Methods:

The process of building UPHO involves (1) collecting and integrating data from several sources,(2) classifying the collected data into drivers and outcomes, (3) incorporating data science techniques for calculating measurable indicators from the raw variables, and (4) studying the extent to which interventions are identified or developed to mitigate drivers that lead to the undesired outcomes.

Results:

We generated and classified indicators of social determinants of health linked to COVID-19. To display functionalities of the UPHO Platform, we presented a prototype design to demonstrate features. We provided a use case scenario of four different users.

Conclusions:

Urban Public Health Observatory (UPHO) serves as an apparatus for implementing effective interventions and is feasible to be adopted as a global platform for chronic and infectious diseases. The UFO surveillance platform provides a novel approach and first-of-kind insight for immediate and long-term health policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic and other future public health crises. UPHO assists public health organizations and policymakers in their efforts on reducing health disparities, achieving health equity, and improving urban population health.