LCHE produces its own weekly radio show, Today's Health Topics, hosted by Ms. Alma Stewart-Allen. The show features various interrelated health topics relevant to Louisiana.
LCHE's initiatives have also been covered by regional and local news outlets like BR Proud and the Louisiana Illuminator. Notable articles include the following:
#LA40by2030 Campaign
The 2020 America’s Health Rankings ranks Louisiana 50th in the United States. In response, LCHE has developed the LA40by2030 campaign to improve health outcomes and quality of life for children and families across the state. The goal of the campaign is to improve the state’s national ranking to 40th by the year 2030. LCHE recognizes that improving Louisiana’s health ranking by 2030 will require the participation of government officials, public healthcare professionals, and the general public. LCHE is inviting stakeholders to develop a health equity database and action platform and contribute to achieving #LA40by2030.
Annual Health Summit
LCHE leads an annual health summit with the goal of improving health in Louisiana through the lens of health equity and determinants of health. The summit is designed to engage a diverse array of stakeholders in better understanding rapdily changing conditions of health with the goal of informing policy and building partnerships for community health improvements. This goal of the summit is to inspire action on the state, regional and local levels, and to facilitate progress towards LA40by2030.
The 2023 health summit will focus on population heath, and women and children's health. The summit is also aligned with the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) state health improvement priorities: behavioral health, chronic disease, community safety, and maternal and child health.
Louisiana Resources and Educational Assessments for Children’s Health (LA REACH)
LA REACH is a pilot program to develop a holistic approach to improving school environments for teachers and students by decreasing instances of student disciplinary actions, violence, alternative school placement, increasing graduation rates, grade point averages, and standardized test scores. The program goals are to address the lack of awareness and resources for mental health, provide trauma-informed training to school personnel, and build stronger home and school relationships. The program strategy is to provide a safe and conducive environment for learning.
Office of Women's Health and Community Health (OHWHCH)
In 2022, LCHE’s organization and activism led to the creation of the first Louisiana office focused on women’s health. The Office of Women’s Health and Community Health (OWHCH) was established under a bill passed by the Louisiana Legislature on June 18, 2022. The office exists to improve women’s health outcomes and act as a coordinating agency and resources center for women’s health data and strategies.
The Wade Institute for Youth Equity
The Wade Institute for Youth Equity is a year-round program dedicated to pursuing youth equity in key quality indicators, and promoting community safety in communities across Louisiana. For more than a decade, the Louisiana Center for Health Equity has devised and implemented a holistic public health approach to adolescent health. This includes, but is not limited to, youth violence prevention, positive youth development, healthy living including sexual risk avoidance, and mental health wellness. The Institute aims to create a well-rounded and equipped student for positive decision making.
LCHE is dedicated to advancing health equity to improve the overall health and well-being of all Louisianans. Since its founding in 2010, LCHE has worked to eliminate health and healthcare disparities attributed to structural, institutional, or social disadvantages. LCHE educates, advises, and mobilizes in an effort to advance health equity by dismantling health disparities caused by poverty, lack of access to quality healthcare, and unhealthy environmental conditions. In recent years, LCHE’s agenda has centered around supporting the behavioral health needs of youth exposed to trauma and childhood adversity.
LCHE also provides opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to participate in experiential learning opportunties through internships and fellowships. Click here to learn more.
LCHE often collaborates with the following organizations: Louisiana Department of Health, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Southern University Law Center, Dillard University, and Louisiana State University (LSU), as well as national, state, and community-based organizations, such as the National Collaborative on Health Equity, League of Women Voters, March of Dimes), American Association of University Women (AAUW), National Congress of Black Women, among others. Interdisciplinary collaboration is talked about as an integral component of health equity advocacy. In her Career Pathways interview, founder and director Alma Stewart-Allen has highlighted the importance of bridging gaps between policy, medicine, social science, social services, business, and law.
LCHE also often works closely with high school and university students, including but not limited to the Louisiana Youth Advisory Council (LYAC). Youth play an integral role in LCHE’s research and advocacy initiatives, through which they acquire the leadership, research and advocacy skills necessary for advancing environmental justice and health equity (see LCHE programs).
LCHE acts on behalf of Louisianans who are most impacted by structural inequities. In 2020, ProPublica published an article highlighting the disparities in Covid-related deaths between Black and white patients treated by Oschner Health, the largest nonprofit, academic health system in Louisiana. The journal’s analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the local coroner’s office, found that patients that were Black were more likely to be sent home, and therefore also more likely to die at home. Families reported that Oschner staff pressured them into accepting hospice care. In response, the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus also called for an investigation of Oschner’s practices. However, the Louisiana Health Department responded by declaring that the complaint was outside their purview. Following this development and seeking more impactful systems-change, LCHE filed a civil rights complaint against Oschner with the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil rights. Results of the civil rights investigation are still pending.
LCHE is led by founder and director Ms. Alma Stewart Allen, a registered nurse, former career state civil servant, entrepreneur, and public health policy advocate. For decades, she has testified at legislative hearings, run advocacy campaigns, and emphasized the significance of social and political determinants of health. She led an advocacy campaign to improve access to healthcare coverage, which resulted in Louisiana becoming the first state in the deep south to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in January 2016. Aiming to improve the state’s health rankings to 40th in the nation by the year 2030 (Louisiana currently ranks 46th), Ms. Stewart Allen continues her advocacy work by developing programs and initiatives aimed at improving health in Louisiana, particularly children’s mental health.
GitHub Repository
“To empower additional modeling efforts, the complete time series of all daily PVI scores and data are available at https://github.com/COVID19PVI/data. “
12 Key Indicators
“[The authors] assembled U.S. county- and state-level datasets into 12 key indicators across four major domains: current infection rates (infection prevalence, rate of increase), baseline population concentration (daytime density/traffic, residential density), current interventions (social distancing, testing rates), and health and environmental vulnerabilities (susceptible populations, air pollution, age distribution, comorbidities, health disparities, and hospital beds).”
Three types of modeling
“Our modeling efforts directly address the discussion in [6], by contextualizing factors such as racial differences with corrections for socioeconomic factors, health resource allocation, and co-morbidities, plus highlighting place- based risks and resource deficits that might explain spatial distributions. Specifically, three types of modeling efforts were performed and are regularly updated. First, epidemiological modeling on cumulative case- and death-related outcomes provides insights into the epidemiology of the pandemic. Second, dynamic time-dependent modeling provides similar outcome estimates as national-level models, but with county-level resolution. Finally, a Bayesian machine learning approach provides data-driven, short-term forecasts. “
Blackness and PM 2.5
“With respect to factors affecting COVID-19 related mortality, we find that the proportion of Black residents and the PM2.5 index of small-particulate air pollution are the most significant predictors among those included, reinforcing conclusions from previous reports[7]. An increase of one percentage point of Black residents is associated with a 3.3% increase in the COVID-19 death rate. The effect of a 1 g/m3 increase in PM2.5 is associated with an approximately 16% increase in the COVID-19 death rate, a value at the high end of a previously reported confidence interval from a report in late April 2020[7] when deaths had reached 38% of the current total.”
Machine learning and prediction
“To accurately predict future cases and mortality, it is necessary to account for the fluid nature of the data. Accordingly, we developed a Bayesian spatiotemporal random-effects model that jointly describes the log-observed and log-death counts to build local forecasts. Log-observed cases for a given day are predicted using known covariates (e.g., population density, social distancing metrics), a spatiotemporal random-effect smoothing component, and the time- weighted average number of cases for these counts. This smoothed time-weighted average is related to a Euler approximation of a differential equation; it provides modeling flexibility while approximating potential mechanistic models of disease spread. The smoothed case estimates are used in a similar spatiotemporal model predicting future log-death counts based on a geometric mean estimate of the estimated number of observed cases for the previous seven days as well as the other data streams. The resulting county-level predictions and corresponding confidence intervals are shown (Fig. 1)."
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343642027_The_COVID-19_Pandemi…
Skylar W. Marvel1, John S. House2, Matthew Wheeler2, Kuncheng Song1, Yihui Zhou1, Fred A. Wright1,3, Weihsueh A. Chiu4, Ivan Rusyn4, Alison Motsinger-Reif2*, David M. Reif1*
Affiliations:
1 Bioinformatics Research Center, Department of Biological Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA.
2 Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, NC, 27709, USA.
3 Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
4 Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77845, USA.
“Data sources in the current model (version 11.2.1) include the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for emergency response and hazard mitigation planning (Horney et al. 2017), testing rates from the COVID Tracking Project (Atlantic Monthly Group 2020), social distancing metrics from mobile device data ( https://www.unacast.com/covid19/social-distancing-scoreboard), and dynamic measures of disease spread and case numbers ( https://usafacts.org/issues/coronavirus/). Methodological details concerning the integration of data streams—plus the complete, daily time series of all source data since February 2020 and resultant PVI scores—are maintained on the public Github project page (COVID19PVI 2020). Over this period, the PVI has been strongly associated with key vulnerability-related outcome metrics (by rank-correlation), with updates of its performance assessment posted with model updates alongside data at the Github project page (COVID19PVI 2020).”
Empowering local actoors
“We present the PVI Dashboard as a dynamic container for contextualizing these disparities. It is a modular tool that will evolve to incorporate new data sources and analytics as they emerge (e.g., concurrent flu infections, school and business reopening statistics, heterogeneous public health practices). This flexibility positions it well as a resource for integrated prioritization of eventual vaccine distribution and monitoring its local impact. The PVI Dashboard can empower local and state officials to take informed action to combat the pandemic by communicating interactive, visual profiles of vulnerability atop an underlying statistical framework that enables the comparison of counties and the evaluation of the PVI’s component data.”
New Pandemic Vulnerability Index dashboard maps global spread of COVID-19 (Texas A&M, The Battalion, April 26, 2021
Centre County Commissioner's Proud of Community's Pandemic Response (WJAC TV, March 23rd, 2021)
Covid-19: how to prioritize worse-off populations in allocating safe and effective vaccines (October 5, 2020)
The COVID-19 Pandemic Vulnerability Index (PVI) Dashboard: monitoring county level vulnerability (Aug 13, 2020)