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The California Student Health Index is made available by the California School-Based Alliance, a statewide organization on a mission to put health care in schools in California, which has lagged behind other states in supporting the establishment of school-based health SBHCs. The alliance aims to increase the number of SBHCs in California to 500 by 2030. There are currently 291 SBHCs in California (and over 10,000 K-12 schools). They are generally implemented by local districts, community organizations, healthcare providers, and school leaders rather than by state officials. Funding also typically follows a grassroots model (placing the burden on local communities), despite the funding California received ($30 million in 2011-2012) from the Affordable Care Act ACA to build and expand SBHCs (out of $200 million nationwide).

According to the California School-Based Alliance, SBHCs offer a step forward towards health and education equity by providing easy and safe access to healthcare, addressing physical, mental, social, and emotional health, and offering integrated healthcare through coordination between schools and community health care providers. The establishment of SBHCs has been recommended by the Center for Disease Control’s Community Preventative Services Task Force based on evidence that they improve educational outcomes for low-income populations and generally promote health equity.

The Student Health Index is intended to support these goals by providing a quantitative analytical tool that supports statewide advocacy to increase and maintain the number of SBHCs, build awareness of the interrelations between health and education, and to provide access to comparative tools for parsing publicly available local data in ways that can help communities and stakeholders identify opportunities to improve health care access in schools.

This data is made available by the CDC Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and more specifically the Geospatial Research, Analysis, and Services Program (GRASP), a team of public health and geospatial science, technology, visualization, and analysis experts. Their mission is to provide leadership, expertise, and education in the application of geography, geospatial science, and geographic information systems (GIS) for public health research and practice.

The creation of the Covid-19 Pandemic Vulnerability Index (PVI) Dashboard was a collaborative effort between scientists from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, North Carolina State University, and Texas @&M University. Their mission was to provide a resource to support dynamic, community-level decision-making in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Each PVI county profile is calculated using Toxicological Prioritization Index (ToxiPi) software, which integrates data within a geospatial context. ToxPi*GIS is meant to promote the development of targeted, effective community policies. ToxPi*GIS was created by the Reif Lab at North Carolina State University. The overarching goal of the lab is to understand the interactions between human health and the environment through the application of analytical/visual methods and experimental design. Data sources include epidemiological studies of human health, high-throughput screening (HTS) of environmental chemicals and model organism data. The lab is run by Dr. David Reif (Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences) and members include students from several degree programs as well as post-doctoral and senior scientists.

The California Healthy Places Index is made available by the Public Health Alliance of Southern California. Their mission is to “make health equity and racial justice a reality” through collaboration and data (https://www.thepublichealthalliance.org/). They engage in advocacy and mobilization to generate this change. They are composed of a coalition of executives representing 10 local health jurisdictions in Southern California (including Long Beach, Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside, among others), an area they highlight as representing 60% of California’s population (with which they blur the boundaries between “California” and “Southern California”).

The alliance emphasizes pursuing equity using publicly available data and collaboration (with government agencies, legislators, hospitals, health plans, philanthropy, and community advocates). They present the Healthy Places Index (HPI) as a tool for exploring how life expectancy is impacted by community conditions.

More specifically, the HPI was created by a steering committee made up of epidemiologists and 3 public health coalitions led by the alliance.