Chase Reece, BSHP '24

During my time in the office today, I continued collecting and analyzing the cardiovascular disease and diabetes data. Unfortunately, many of the Archway communities experienced worse health outcomes across all rankings. However, this is not surprising due to the many complex factors associated with rurality that influence the health of a community. There were a few communities in particular that stood out because their rankings were so much lower than state averages, and when looking into it further, typically the more rural a community was, the worse their rankings were overall. One of the many potential causes for this decrease in rankings is a lack of medical care and health services in rural communities. To see if there was a correlation, the number of physicians, including primary care, cardiologists, and endocrinologists, were documented for each county. On the other hand, there were a few communities that had better health rankings than state averages. An interesting aspect of these communities that faired better is that they were mostly in North Georgia, whereas the ones with lower rankings were in South Georgia. This disparity among rural communities could exist due to socioeconomic factors and social determinants of health, as communities in North Georgia are often of higher socioeconomic status and different demographic makeup than South Georgia communities, in addition to having greater access to care.