Better Understanding Healthcare Insurance Disparities in the United States: Design Science and Spatial Analytics

This research utilizes information systems and social science methods to investigate the question: Does where you live and who you are influence your healthcare insurance coverage? It combines design science with a location analytics approach for analysis. There are six phases: project understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modeling, evaluation, and deployment. The objective is to create an artifact that integrates both to better understand social disparities in the United States with the use of US Census data. This new method and authoritative data consider location and socioeconomic attributes to assess disparities in a practical and structured manner. It is used to examine healthcare insurance disparities at the tract level. Healthcare is critical to the quality of life and well-being of individuals, which makes for more productive individuals and their economy. Lack of healthcare creates a greater risk of death, expenditures, disabilities, opportunity costs, and a poorer quality of life.