Social Determinants of Health Data Integration Barriers in Nueces County, Texas

The Approach

In the Texas county of Nueces, significant disparities persist in marginalized communities, which hinder their ability to improve health outcomes. Such is the case in the primarily Hispanic Nueces County community of Molina. Given the complexity of challenges in Nueces County and Molina, this project incorporated the principles of Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) through a mixed-methods approach to analyze linkages between major health disparities, SDOHs, environmental and climate factors, with focus on flooding and storms, air quality and urban heat.

An interdisciplinary team worked with local experts through the project’s Action Committee to co-design and co-produce a set of tools that address the challenge of understanding and integrating SDOH, climate and environmental data for improved decision-making.

• The geospatial Nueces County Community Health & Environment Tool can be used by diverse decision-makers to better understand SDOH and environmental factors in Nueces County and how such factors may be interplaying with health.
  
  The tool organizes health, SDOH and environmental data at the census tract level.
  
  The tool also makes all data available for download such that interested users can easily access the data for integration into their own external analyses.
  
  A tool further provides summary statistics to add depth and context for local needs assessments, for grant writing, and in general provide a snapshot across communities that can be used to better target scarce resources.

• SDOH Logic Models are available for all five health outcomes of concern for the project: asthma, diabetes, hypertension, obesity and depression. Informed by peer-reviewed literature and state and local reports, the Action Committee SDOH Logic Model Working Group used their local knowledge to identify relevant connections between specific SDOHs and health outcomes, helped the project team visualize these connections in logic models, and, where feasible, made links to local data.
  
  The models serve as a guide for decision-makers that are looking to investigate underlying social, economic and environmental factors that impact health outcomes in Nueces County
  
  For each health outcome, health practitioners and others can use the models to triangulate specific datasets to view in the tool when assessing social, economic and environmental impacts to health and health disparities. 
  

• SDOH Data Integration Framework provides background and operational guidance on how health practitioners and others can address the challenge of assessing and integrating SDOH data.
  
  Co-produced with the Action Committee SDOH Data Integration Working Group, it further provides step by step guidance on how to integrate curated data for Nueces County that is available for download through the Nueces Community Health & Environment Tool.
  

• Priority Recommendations for Action offers a discrete set of actions that key partners have agreed to move forward. The Community Resilience Center, Corpus Christi-Nueces County Public Health District and the Harte Research Institute will use this document to continue this work.
  
  The document also further details the deep engagement conducted in the at-risk neighborhood of Molina, and the lessons learned that will continue to inform future work.
  

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