Learn how to work with social determinants of health data, build a reproducible analysis in R, create interactive Tableau visualizations, and share your work openly.
Move through three connected modules, from understanding the data to analyzing it and sharing your work openly. Each module is presented as its own learning page while still belonging to one connected sequence.
Learn how social determinants of health are organized, explore the public datasets available for research, and understand how geographic data can be linked using FIPS codes.
Build a reproducible R project by downloading, cleaning, documenting, merging, and analyzing public health data.
Turn your analysis into an interactive Tableau project, then publish your code, data, and documentation so others can find and reuse your work.
Use the demonstrations as you move through the toolkit, from connecting data to publishing and sharing the final project.
Student fellows apply the toolkit to build reproducible workflows and Tableau visualizations. Projects are shown as dashboard screenshot previews, with the newest featured example highlighted in a full-width row. Open the full interactive dashboard when you want to explore the maps, charts, filters, and details.
Research question: How are health center locations and operating hours distributed across Illinois, and how do county-level vulnerability and health indicators vary across the state?
Open Interactive Dashboard
Explore health center operations, community vulnerability, and selected health indicators across Illinois.
Research question: Which Indiana counties experience higher social vulnerability and relatively lower access to HRSA health centers?
Open Interactive Dashboard
Explore social vulnerability and access to HRSA health centers across Indiana.
Research question: Where do high environmental burden and low-income, low-access food conditions overlap across Illinois census tracts, and which counties have the greatest concentration of these double-burden communities?
Open Interactive Dashboard
Explore environmental burden and low-income, low-access food conditions at the Illinois census-tract level.
Research question: How do primary care shortage designations and the mix of HRSA health-center resources vary across Georgia counties?
Open Interactive Dashboard
Explore primary care shortage designations, health-center mix, and selected county health indicators across Georgia.
Research question: How are county-level social determinants of health, particularly educational attainment and uninsured rates, associated with diabetes prevalence across California's 58 counties?
Explore how diabetes prevalence varies across California counties and how education and insurance coverage relate to that burden.
Open Interactive Dashboard
Follow a consistent sequence from choosing a research question to publishing a reproducible, citable project.
Build research that others can find, access, understand, reproduce, and reuse.
Make your work discoverable through GitHub and, when appropriate, a repository record or persistent identifier.
Share data, code, and visualizations through openly accessible platforms and formats.
Use standard identifiers, consistent variables, and open file formats.
Document code, data sources, methods, and project files so others can build on the work.
Access the complete learning toolkit and the reproducible project resources that support the learning experience.
View all three parts together, including the full table of contents and the complete learning sequence.
Open Toolkit Folder →Explore the R scripts, documentation, project data, data dictionary, and reproducible workflow.
Open GitHub Project →Access the Canvas learning module resources for importing and adapting the Open Research Toolkit in Canvas.
Open Canvas Module →
This project has been made possible in part by grant 2024-349547 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.