DeepHealth: Geospatial and ML-Based Approach to Identify Health Disparities and Determinants for Improving Pandemic Health Care

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing health disparities, and its impact has fallen disproportionately on disadvantaged and vulnerable communities. Racial and ethnic minorities such as Black Americans who are at a particular disadvantage are more likely to be the potential target of COVID-19 infection and are dying at alarmingly high rates. Despite a promising solution of the COVID-19 vaccination offers hope, equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines remains a challenge in the US, which has compounded the existing disparities in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among racial and ethnic minority groups. The deep and pervasive history of medical racism in the US has led to the vaccine hesitancy in racial and ethnic minorities, and thereby caused the disparities. Although some studies examine determinants of health disparities (e.g., social health determinants), there is a shortage of studies examining the social, structural and constructural health determinants, either alone or in tandem with other determinants. Little research paid attention to leveraging geographic information to trace the social, structural and constructural health determinants, which can provide a lower level of granularity. In this paper, we propose DeepHealth, a geospatial and ML-based (machine learning based) approach to identify diverse determinants (including the social, structural, and constructural determinants) of health disparities in COVID-19 pandemic, which provides a lower level of granularity. We provide a thorough analysis of health disparities based on multiple COVID-19 datasets and examine the social, structural, and constructural health determinants to assist in ascertaining why disparities (in racial and ethnic minorities who are particularly disadvantaged) occur in incidence and mortality rates due to COVID-19 pandemic. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach. This research provides new strategies for health disparity identification and determinant tracking with a goal of mitigating health disparities and improving pandemic health care. The research suggests that policymakers should give attention to initiatives that will protect the health of populations (i.e., an upstream approach to reducing health disparities) rather than solely focusing only on providing health and social services.