Community Health Research

Recognizing the importance of serving the community surrounding Temple University, the community health core of the Center for Biostatistics and Epidemiology is working to build synergy and relationships with the community and with existing TU Departments, centers, and programs with community efforts.  The community health core has existing data resources and is working to build up new research projects to support health disparity and health equity research.  This core plans to provide data and statistical support for research and clinical investigators and medical students interested in community research. 

Community Health Research Resources

Temple Health: Block-by-Block (THB3) was a multi-disciplinary research partnership at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. This study collected general demographic, behavioral, social determinant of health and specific health information on over 10000 local North Philadelphia residents.  Investigators interested in accessing community data from THB3 for research studies should contact Dr. Shannon Lynch at Shannon.lynch@fccc.edu.

Neighborhood Data System.  We developed and derived systematic code and a data management system of over 1000 small area-level measures (at the census tract level) of social determinants of health related to economic stability, education, health care access, social and community context (e.g. segregation measures) and socioeconomic and built environments that can be linked to patient or participant level data using geocodes derived from address information.   This resources allows neighborhood circumstances to be linked with health data for the purposes of health disparity and health equity research.  Investigators interested in geocoding and utilizing neighborhood or area-level data should contact Dr. Shannon Lynch at Shannon.Lynch@fccc.edu