Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Preventive Service Use Among Adults Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Our objective was to assess changes in preventive services use before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We obtained secondary survey data from the National Health Interview Survey for 2019 and 2021. We examined, six preventive services among all adults.

Which Definition of Rurality Should I Use?: The Relative Performance of 8 Federal Rural Definitions in Identifying Rural-Urban Disparities.

Background: The federal government uses multiple definitions for identifying rural communities based on various geographies and different elements of rurality.

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to: (1) assess the degree to which rural definitions identify the same areas as rural; and (2) assess rural-urban disparities identified by each definition across socioeconomic, demographic, and health access and outcome measures.

Research Design: We determined the rural status of each census tract and calculated the rural-urban disparity resulting from each definition, as well as across the number of definitions in which tracts were designated as rural (rurality agreement).

Using State Licensure Data to Assess North Carolina's Health Workforce COVID-19 Response Capacity.

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care decision-makers in North Carolina needed information about the available health workforce in order to conduct workforce surge planning and to anticipate concerns about professional or geographic workforce shortages. Descriptive and cartographic analyses were conducted using licensure data held by the North Carolina Health Professions Data System to assess the supply of respiratory therapists, nurses, and critical care physicians in North Carolina. Licensure data were merged with population data and numbers of intensive care unit (ICU) beds drawn from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Healthcare Cost Report Information System (HCRIS).