Precision Health members Brian M. Schmidt, Yiyuan Huang, Mousumi Banerjee, Salim S. Hayek, and Rodica Pop-Busui have a new publication to share, “Residential Address Amplifies Health Disparities and Risk of Infection in Individuals With Diabetic Foot Ulcers” in Diabetes Care, March 2024. 

We spoke with Precision Health member and primary author Brian M Schmidt, DPM, Associate Professor, Internal Medicine and Metabolism, Endocrinology & Diabetes to learn more about this work, and how Precision Health tools and data were utilized.

This team leveraged the precision health datasets that blend common clinical characteristics from patients with more abstract data associated with geographic location. Dr. Schmidt says, “This study demonstrates our potential to quickly evaluate social determinants of health characteristics that are readily available to us instead of waiting for the collection of surveys from patients. There is so much data out there and this expeditiously allows us to evaluate it.”

One of the many available data sets within the Precision Health Analytics Platform, our suite of tools, services, and data sets, is the geolocation data set featured in DataDirect links National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) (https://nanda.isr.umich.edu/about-nanda/) data to UM Health electronic health records (EHR) through geolocated address coordinates using latitude and longitude, utilized by the team for this study.

When asked what the biggest takeaways or insights gained from this study, Schmidt said, “While disparities exist in non-traumatic lower extremity amputations for people with diabetes, they are rooted in the way we manage diabetic foot infection initially at the hospital. As the study demonstrates, where you live your daily life effects the type of outcome you will receive. Left unmitigated, and in line with the future directions of the manuscript, we will continue to have similar results if changes aren’t made. This is unacceptable and we need to incorporate these elements, many of which are humanizing, into our practice to better represent the entire person, not just their biological determinants of health.”

Read the publication in Diabetes Care here.