In Washington, for instance, rural residents are one-third more likely to die from intentional self-harm or 13% more likely to die from heart disease.

While statistics like these help guide public health policy and spending, they can hide even greater health disparities within those rural communities, says lead author Betty Bekemeier, director of the School of Public Health’s Northwest Center for Public Health Practice and a professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Washington.

“Populations in rural areas already have suffered disproportionately from a lot of negative health outcomes,” she says. “Then on top of that, they lack the data, capacity, and infrastructure to understand and better address those problems.”

Yet, some of the data rural public health officials need to better serve their communities exists but is hard to access and use. So, what gives?

To find out, Bekemeier and her colleagues at the Northwest Center embarked on the SHARE-NW project: a five-year effort to identify, gather, and visualize data in four Northwest states to help rural communities more effectively address health disparities and achieve health equity.

“In our study with rural public health system leaders, we identified barriers to using data, such as 1) lack of easy access to timely data, 2) data quality issues specific to rural and tribal communities, and 3) the inability for rural leaders to use those data,” write the study authors.

To address this problem, SHARE-NW is building a readily accessible database and the related visualizations so local health officials can more easily talk about the makeup of their communities, identify local needs, and foster data-supported decisions.

Read the full article about using data to improve rural public health by Jake Ellison at Futurity.