University of Virginia Unveils Center for Health Equity, Precision Medicine

The University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine has launched its Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health, which aims to improve health outcomes for rural, economically challenged, and minority populations across the state.

The center is designed to pull expertise from various UVA faculty members in an effort to promote health equity and address disparities within public health.

“The pandemic has really taught us that, one, our public health infrastructure is not nearly as strong as it should be. And, two, we can't think of healthcare and public health in this one-size-fits-all type of mentality,” said Keith L. Keene, PhD, professor of public health services at UVA and the center’s founding director, in the press release.

Keene’s research focuses on investigating genetic risk factors for complex diseases, working closely with UVA’s Center for Public Health Genomics. Through the new Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health, he aims to connect genomics with population health.

“Our goal here is to build a new center – an interdisciplinary center – that's really devoted to integrating precision medicine,” he said. “So we’ll use the genomics work that we do here in the Center for Public Health Genomics along with public health and health informatics approaches to think about how we can improve the health and well-being of rural, economically challenged and racial/ethnic minority populations.”

By incorporating large amounts of genomic, social determinants of health (SDOH), clinical, and other data, such as the number of specialists in a geographic area or barriers to care access, the center will help advance a more holistic understanding of human health and healthcare, the press release states. Doing so may help promote the attainment of each patient’s health potential, Keene indicated.

“[Using these data,] we can then see how the biology and environment interplay to create the overall health profile of individuals,” he explained. “Then we can take it a step further and think about how we can bring in data such as anonymized electronic health records to really give us a full picture of why certain individuals are more likely to have a particular disease or respond to a particular treatment.”

These efforts are part of UVA’s larger 10-year strategic plan, announced in February. Under the plan, UVA aims to become the top public academic health system in the US by enhancing community outreach, significantly expanding access to care, and growing its biotech research enterprise.

Other organizations are also leveraging data analytics to reduce and address health disparities.

In January, the University of Notre Dame Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society and Accenture launched a collaboration designed to address community health challenges and identify care gaps through health equity data analytics.

The partnership will leverage the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society's new Health Equity Data Lab to support the Accenture Health Equity Data project, in which researchers will evaluate the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to solve various healthcare challenges and target inequities.