Identifying Women’s Health Care Deserts: Analyzing OBGYN Access in the United States at the County and Regional Level
Purpose: Produce a newly developed version of "Maternity Care Deserts," loosely based upon a mapping project by the March of Dimes but with additional complexity factored in.
Research Questions: What does it mean to have access to “maternity health care”? How do we best define and measure what a maternity health care desert, or oasis, is? Who (and in what region) does and doesn’t have access to this care? How does access vary by region, proximity to metro areas (urban versus rural), or by other features?
Hypothesis & Results: I theorized that the original map of “deserts” would change starkly once contiguous counties’ providers were factored in, with some of the counties designated deserts disappearing due to the appearance of contiguous county access. “True” deserts that emerge, then, will be counties that lack access even in neighboring accessible counties.
Methodology: Data research, data cleaning, data analysis and manipulation, new variable development, producing comparison maps with old and new metrics, zooming in on regions/states and analyzing regional differences qualitatively
Tools: Python, ArcGIS Pro & ArcGIS Online
Skills: Data cleaning, joining, and manipulation; new variable development; exploratory data analysis and descriptive statistics; spatial analyses, spatial statistics
Results: ArcGIS StoryMap feat. Interactive Webmaps