Leveraging Key Stakeholder Engagement And Human Mobility Data To Optimize Equity And Access
Historically marginalized patient populations suffer disproportionately worse health outcomes for preventable health conditions. Mobile programs provide a strategic opportunity to deliver geographically targeted community health interventions, including those in areas with increased disparities in health and higher social vulnerability. However, approaches for optimizing the spatial allocation and location of mobile vaccination clinics are limited, potentially resulting in suboptimal allocation of resources and suboptimal convenience for clients. We discuss the formation, strategic planning, and implementation of a community-based mobile clinic program delivering COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccination services in the Greater Boston Area using a set of data-drive strategies that paired with community-based organization partnerships to identify highly accessible locations with the goal of optimizing outreach to communities with relatively higher social vulnerability and lower vaccination coverage. We also discuss how we are using this strategy to now expand menu of services to include care focused on cardiometabolic conditions. These strategies use data from digital sources (including travel time data and aggregated GPS-derived foot traffic data) and information from mobile clinic clients and community partners to estimate accessibility for candidate mobile clinic locations. We propose that a relatively small set of key data resources, many of which are publicly available, coupled with key stakeholder community engagement can provide important insights for planning and delivery of mobile vaccination services, with direct applicability to the delivery of preventative services for cardiometabolic conditions. This approach is readily scalable to other locations and can be extended to the delivery of other mobile or community-based service activities (for example, chronic disease screening or treatment for substance use disorders).