HealthEQKG: A Knowledge Graph and Data Model for Health Equity Research
摘要
Owing to the expense of healthcare and aging demographics, health inequity has emerged as a critical challenge in the United States, leading to significant disparities in health outcomes and unequal access to care in different communities. Understanding the complex associations between the distribution of healthcare providers, clinician characteristics, and socioeconomic conditions in communities of practice is essential to developing policies to close health inequity gaps. However, research in this domain is challenging due to the fragmentation of relevant datasets (including by the government), and the difficulty of using these datasets in a semantically unified manner. To address this challenge, we introduce HealthEQKG, an open-source knowledge graph (KG) specifically designed to support both qualitative and quantitative health equity research. Supported by a compact underlying ontology, HealthEQKG integrates two national-level (but independent) government agency datasets containing physician data and socioeconomic data, followed by data augmentation through the use of established Semantic Web resources. The complete KG contains 72,658 physicians and 28,346 Area Deprivation Indices for zip codes across the US. Through a series of fifteen competency questions, and two use-cases, we demonstrate its utility as a queryable resource for public health policymakers and researchers.