The Mayo Clinic HOUSES Program

The Mayo Clinic Housing-Based Socioeconomic Status (HOUSES) Program has developed, validated, and implemented a novel index for measuring individual socioeconomic status (SES) based on housing features. Young J. Juhn, M.D., M.P.H., with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, leads the HOUSES Program. The program's mission is to support health research, care, and policy pursuing healthcare delivery in the personal and social context of people and populations through scientific and technological innovation. The aim is to maximize the health potential for people and populations across all socioeconomic backgrounds and eliminate health disparities.

The Mayo Clinic HOUSES Program enables large-scale, objective measurements of patient-level social determinants of health through scientific and technological innovation. These analyses serve to enhance Mayo Clinic's capability to pursue high-value care and high-quality research.

The goals of the Mayo Clinic HOUSES Program include:

• Pursuing methodological innovation.
• Understanding the mechanisms underlying health disparities and differences.
• Translating scientific evidence into practice and policy.
• Enabling precision medicine for population health.

SERVICES

Mayo Clinic HOUSES Program services include:

• HOUSES Index. Provides individual-level socioeconomic measures at the time of interest.
• Area Deprivation Index (ADI). Gives aggregate measure for rankings of neighborhoods by socioeconomic disadvantage in a region of interest.
• Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) classification. RUCA codes provide a breakdown of county-level metropolitan and micropolitan areas — population density, urbanization, and daily commuting — to identify urban cores and adjacent territory that is economically integrated with those cores.
• Urban and rural by census. Offers delineation of geographic areas, identifying both individual urban areas and the rural areas of the nation.
• Estimation of distance from study subject to a reference place. Furnishes distance from a specific address to a point of interest such as the distance from a patient's home to the hospital.
• Geo reports. Enable pinpointing event locations of interest on a map and overlaying other events of interest over HOUSES Index distribution.

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