Objective: This communication presents the results of defining a tribal health jurisdiction by a combination of tribal affiliation (TA) and case address.
Materials and methods: Through a county-tribal partnership, Geographic Information System (GIS) software and custom code were used to extract tribal data from county data by identifying reservation addresses in county extracts of COVID-19 case records from December 30, 2019, to December 31, 2022 (n = 374 653) and COVID-19 vaccination records from December 1, 2020, to April 18, 2023 (n = 2 355 058).
Results: The tool identified 1.91 times as many case records and 3.76 times as many vaccination records as filtering by TA alone.
Discussion and conclusion: This method of identifying communities by patient address, in combination with TA and enrollment, can help tribal health jurisdictions attain equitable access to public health data, when done in partnership with a data sharing agreement. This methodology has potential applications for other populations underrepresented in public health and clinical research.
Keywords: American Indian and Alaska Native; geocoding; geographic information systems; health equity; public health surveillance.
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association.