SDOH Data Refuge

In early 2025, there was a widespread effort to remove crucial federal public health datasets in the United States. As researchers, community leaders, and scholars, this has a significant impact on all of our work.

Fortunately, the SDOH & Place Project team had already earmarked, indexed, and identified critical datasets pertinent to measuring the structural drivers of health in the year prior.

When the Great Purge began, the team extracted multiple datasets at risk of being lost, in collaboration with colleagues across the state of Illinois, and has since linked multiple datasets to the SDOH Search Discovery Platform. The University of Chicago Library team, as an early collaborator, developed additional metadata for the data, and colleagues from a central Illinois health system further supported efforts by identifying and downloading critical measures.

The SDOH Data Refuge includes multiple datasets & guides from:

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including the Social Vulnerability Index for all time periods and spatial scales
• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including EJScreen and EJ Index measures.
• The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)

Alternatively, you can search for the dataset of interest on the SDOH Discovery platform, and find a link to the archive with additional documentation made available, when available.

Our current approach to identifying, organizing, and sharing previously publicly-available SDOH data across federal systems is informed as researchers who regularly use the data for analyses. Thus on the Box site, screenshots of webpages are preserved in many cases as are technical documentations, when available and accessible. We know that data means more with context, so linking the metadata and related documents is crucial to the work.

We also integrated resources and archives pulled from other teams across the country, including:

• CDC guidelines and prevention resources from Jessica Valenti’s team
• Environmental Justice Index measurements archived by the Environmental Data & Government Initiative
• A full PDF list of datasets available from archive.org. If we don’t have what you’re looking for, and/or if you already know the specific CSV you need, click on the data to download directly from the PDF.

We are grateful to additional feedback and guidance we received from colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Brown University’s School of Public Health.

Finally, we are incredibly grateful to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for their support of the SDOH & Place project, and their commitment to advancing health for all populations. In January 2025, they renewed their promise. Additionally, we are grateful to the State of Illinois for serving as a refuge for research and innovations in public health for all peoples.