For my final project, I intend to source socio-economic, household structure, population density and related data from the US Census Bureau, healthcare quality and safety indicators and chronic conditions data from CMS, and potentially data on air pollution through the EPA’s Envirofacts portal. It is well known that health outcomes are corellated with socio-economic status and that there are significant disparities in outcomes across ethnic and racial groups. However, I wonder whether and to what extent are there differences in the quality of healthcare provision and levels of patient safety across demographic groups and communities. If these differences do exist, how do they relate to demographic and other factors - income, unemployment levels, race, ethnicity, household composition, urbanization, etc. - in the sourced data?
I plan to source much of the data described above through API requests, as one of my primary goals is to build a working interface to the Census Bureau’s most recent Census and American Community Survey and the CMS Hospital Compare datasets that could be used again for future academic and professional projects. The chronic conditions data will be obtained in CSV format from https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/Chronic-Conditions/CC_Main.html. I also intend to create a Shiny application in order to enable interactive exploration, analysis, and visualization of the data.