Visualize Health Gaps

Despite continued advances in healthcare and technology, there are persistent gaps in health and healthcare across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups around the world. Why is it that one ethnic group continues to suffer from a specific type of cancer while another ethnic group has experienced declining rates of incidence? Understanding these gaps, or health disparities, is crucial to the improvement of healthcare quality as a whole. And so, we are asking the world’s design community to help us understand health disparities through data visualization.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the US has collected data on disparities within ‘priority populations,' which are groups with unique healthcare needs or issues that require special attention. The overall purpose is to help identify the groups in greatest need and to target quality improvement programs towards them.

In collaboration with the Research Centers in Minority Institutions Program (RCMI), we’d like to challenge the world’s designers to produce cutting-edge, informative visualizations of the data to help achieve this goal.