Outline

What I hope to acomplish in this project is to show the healtcare inequalities between counties in Ohio. There is a massive rural urban divide in Ohio not dissimilar to that of Pennsylvania. This leads to healthcare being acsses and healthcare spending being being inequal across different counties in Ohio. In a previous project I did I found that a high majority of the county where I am from Carroll County does not have a hospital within a thrity minute drive. This led me to want to look into this more with the data.

What I hope to do in this project is to show that there is a split in the availability between counties especially the rural and urban counties. I also want to highlight that spending by county on healthcare varies significantly and this could show the per capita spending on healthcare also. In the end I want to be able to show all this to highlight that their is a problem with healthcare inequality in Ohio and how this could be effecting especially more poor rural areas of the state.

Project Structure

First - I want to show A visualization showing the urban rural divide in Ohio this would be a map most likely of census tracts this would allow me to talk about the large divide in Ohio between urban and rural areas of the state. This would be accompanied by a visualization that dispalys the population centers in the state.

Second - Show a county breakdown on total spending on healthcare vs a per capita expenditure on healthcare in a split bargraph. this would show the different levels of spending for people

Third - This would lead me into talking about the healhcare equality differences between counties that have access to resources and those who do not I will make a visualization for this section that explains the average drive time to a hospial by county to show the major problem of this inequality.

Fourth - Propose on a map changes or additions that can be made to remedy the problem the previous graphs show the problem this will give me an opportunity to propose change such as state government spending more in counties that are underresourced to develop hospitals or hospital alternatives that can help those who do not have adequte access to healthcare.

Initial sketches

The popopulation density within Ohio is wide with their being significantly higher density in the several urban centers in Ohio. This change in density is also a problem for the people who come from the less densly populated areas. This is do to access. Those who fall into the lighly shaded area will in general have a harder time reaching critical infrasturucter when the time is needed. They may also face the issue that they do not have access to critical services tantemount on them being able to survive if neccessary. This is not an unknown fact. The data shows us that healthcare quality is significnly different between the counties that are more urban versus more rural. This plot showes data from countyhealthcarerankings.org and when put into this format it is clear that their is a divide between what counties are able to offer and this comes down to the availability of resources the denser counties have as compared to those who lack in population density. The healthcare spending in Ohio comes down to many factors outside of this but if we breka the problem down to a per capita level we can see that the counties with more spending may have a lower per capita spending issue but this seems to be a driving factor as to how they are able to have better healthcare. If they are able to sustain a hospital with less per capita spending it could show that the density is the solution but solving for population density in a state where the population is declineing is not something easy to accomplish. Instead I propose that the state shoulder more of the burden when it comes to the health of our rural counties if these counties do not have the resources or the human capital to draw from to serve their communities then we should be able to find solutions such as funding mobile clinics for these areas to make sure the people who live in these areas can get the healthcare we need I propose that we put these in these location abc… to alleviate the areas in the most dire need.

The data

the main data source that I will be using for this project is from

countyhealthratings.org https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/health-data/ohio/data-and-resources

the data set here gives me more than enough to go off of for a majority of this project. For one of my visualizations to talk about the percent of people more than thirty minutes from a hospital I will be making a data set for this using ArcGIS to create this data set then visualizaing it outside of this software.

The main data set will be used to make other visualization as this data has county healthcare information. I may need to add fields such as how rural these counties are in order to see exatly what I am looking for and perhaps merge multiple years of data if I end up showing the changes to the healthcare availability over time.

Method and medium

In a few sentences, you should document how you plan on completing your final project.

I plan on completing this project first by idenifying the fields of data I need in my main data source this source has a lot of data and I will likely only need a few of them so going through the data and narrowing this down will be important.

The second thing ill need to do is figure out what data I need to supplement in that is not in the main data such as population density sort of data

Then I will need to spend time making the visualizations and running them by people that can give me good feedback on the graphs to see what I can do better

References

Data and resources - Ohio. County Health Rankings & Roadmaps. (n.d.). https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/health-data/ohio/data-and-resources