Mental Health care may be attained at myriad kinds of facilities: inpatient, outpatient, mental health treatment facilities, hospitals, and the solo clinician. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) is a unit within the federal department of Health and Human Services. It serves as the US government's central arm to treat mental health and substance abuse. One of its tools is to help those in need find a clinician or place to go. Before we may know where care is lacking we need to identify where care exists.

If you are in need of help please use this tool to find treatment.

Sadly, we know that being near a clinic, or clinician, does not mean you will have speedy, or affordable access. Many barriers still remain in getting care to those that need it. The following sections focus on where the access is not and what are some of the characteristics of the people that live there. Looking at a bunch of dots from 30,000 feet is not particularly helpful. Instead, we are able to see how many facilities exist in each county. Some have none, others one, and yet more have significantly more.

The map above, as the one before it, has its limitations. We see that 994 counties have no clinics. The challenge then, is determining how far a person in one of those counties needs to travel to reach care. A county with significant area might be sparsely populated making it look like a significant population does not have access to care when it really just means a significant amount of acreage doesn't. The population of that county might be relatively close to a clinic in a neighboring county.

We have two charts below that try to help solve this problem. On the left the columns represent the number of clinics per 100,000 people by area. A state like Virginia clearly has the edge here. While the line shows the average distance a person needs to drive to reach a clinic. The chart on the right just shows the clinic density described previously.

Insert County Data Aggregated to the State for Distance to Clinic and Clinic Density by Population and Area Chart



Physical well being has a lot to do with mental health. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation conducts annual rankings of community well being at the county level using myriad factors but our map illustrates the percentage of the population in poor to fair health.

Insert County Health Rankings Map



Suicide & Access to Care


Myriad reasons exist as to why nearly 46,000 Americans died by suicide in 2020 but chief among them is access to care. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tracks deaths in the United States and suicide is the 12th leading cause. Privacy statutes require that counties with fewer than 10 incidences of suicide in a year will have no data. The maps on this page, and the charts that follow, highlight the 980 counties for which we have data.

Insert Suicide and Clinic Count Map



The suicide rate and its relationship with the number of clinics in a county is not the only way to understand access to care. Key to all of our Care Desert analyses is how far people need to drive to reach a clinic, even if their county has one, or more clinics. Let's look at the suicide rate and the average distance a person would need to drive in their county.

Insert Suicide and Distance To Care Map



Why is the map missing so many counties?


The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) aquires data on all manner of death, including by suicide, at the county level. To protect the privacy of individuals only those counties with values 10 or greater are included in the dataset. Of the 3,142 counties in the US 980 counties have data to analyze.

What HSR.health Provides


HSR.health is an innovation-first healthcare technology firm and the leading provider of health-focused geospatial data analytics. Our AI-enabled, geospatial platform curates data globally and provides actionable health risk data analytics to healthcare industry professionals, NGO’s, and government entities.

Capabilities


  • Leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other advanced algorithms to gain insights into their relationship between social determinants of health (SDOH) and global outcomes, health equity, disease transmission, and the economic risk from health emergencies.

  • Provide curated visualizations of geospatial data analytics and innovative risk indices through our GeoHealth Platform to provide decision-makers with actionable risk insights.

  • Global data mining from disparate sources within and outside the healthcare sector.

  • Tailored datasets optimized for organizations' unique needs.