Health equity / Published research
Social determinants of health
Health begins beyond the clinic.
Understanding how socioeconomic conditions relate to access, care utilization, and health equity.
01 / Inside the method
How it works.
Select a stage to explore the workflow.
Conceptual schematic · Simplified method overview
Income, education, insurance, and neighborhood deprivation describe different dimensions of socioeconomic context.
Health records are used to calculate ZIP-code-level utilization of specialized pancreatic cancer care.
Regression analyses examine associations between socioeconomic measures and utilization while accounting for other factors.
The results highlight differences in access that can guide further research and equity-focused planning.
02 / Context & sources
The research.
Who reaches specialized care?
In my first-author pancreatic cancer study, we examined 5,847 patients in the Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin health system from 2000–2023. We studied how neighborhood socioeconomic conditions relate to specialized care utilization at the ZIP-code level.
Greater neighborhood deprivation was associated with lower utilization after adjustment. These are observational, area-level associations; they should not be interpreted as individual-level causes.
Read the pancreatic cancer study · PLOS ONE, 2025.
A broader focus on health equity
Related collaborations examine socioeconomic conditions across nutrition, swallowing care, injury, and older-adult falls:
- From food deserts to nutritional equity: exposing socioeconomic drivers of hypertension · Journal of Nutritional Science, 2026.
- Social determinants of health on dysphagia care pathways · The Laryngoscope, 2024.
- Impacts of socioeconomic status on dentoalveolar trauma · WMJ, 2023.
- Socioeconomic disparities in healthcare utilization for older-adult falls · medRxiv, 2023; preprint, not peer reviewed.