Arthi Rao
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
An estimated 3.6 million people a year miss timely medical care because they lack reliable transportation. This barrier, called transportation disadvantage (TD), falls hardest on people of color, rural communities, disabled people and low-income populations.
- Fields
Engineering
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
- Topics
transportation disadvantage
healthcare access
social determinants of health
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Refine socioecological theories of transportation disadvantage and its effect on healthcare access through extensive engagement with community, health-system and industry stakeholders.
- Develop community sensing methods that collect fine-grained, time- and place-specific data on transportation disadvantage and other social determinants of health, filling gaps left by coarse existing data.
- Integrate multilevel transportation and social-needs data into optimization frameworks for resource allocation, demonstrated in a mobile clinic pilot across six North Carolina counties.
More about the research
It is one of the social determinants of health (SDOH), the living conditions that shape access to care. Health systems want to address it but rely on coarse data that miss how needs shift from block to block and hour to hour, so interventions are hard to target.
Why it matters
Better local data on transportation barriers could help health systems place services such as mobile clinics where and when people can actually reach them, reducing missed care for rural, disabled, low-income and minority communities. The resource allocation methods piloted in North Carolina may also inform other interventions that address social determinants of health and upstream risk reduction.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Develop and refine Meet Me on the Pitch, a soccer-based mental health program for newcomer youth, with an enhanced referral network, using focus groups and key informant interviews with youth, coaches, and community members.
Suzanne Mitchell
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether REDDCAT2 delays hospital readmission within 90 days compared with usual discharge care for patients with type 2 diabetes, in a comparative effectiveness trial. The intervention pairs REDD-CAT social-needs screening with patient navigation.
Juan Cardet
University of South Florida, FL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether Black and Latinx adults with moderate-to-severe asthma have distinct SDOH exposomes, sets of social and environmental exposures, that link to worse asthma, using PREPARE trial data with geocoded SDOH measures.
The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
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