The COVID-19 pandemic exposed healthcare inequities regarding race, ethnicity, and income. As a result, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) recommended the use of the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), a disadvantage index from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for equitable allocation of COVID-19 vaccines. Disadvantage indices (DIs) like SVI and the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), use a certain set of variables like income, housing, and education level to measure socioeconomic disadvantage. Because DIs were quickly adopted and implemented, there is a lack of a clear understanding of their impact on reducing structural racism and discrimination. The purpose of this study was to extract the uses of ADI in published peer-reviewed literature.

On Pubmed, we ran a search for “ADI” and looked at the most recent US-based papers. We have conducted a data extraction for eighty papers so far. We found that most papers used ADI in clinical care or public health settings and twenty-three papers explicitly looked at racial disparities. 

Our research is ongoing, but we can see that it is common to use ADI in the clinical care or public health settings as opposed to other settings like natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic, where SVI is mostly used. We have also seen a significant increase in the use of ADI when looking at income or racial disparities within the past few years, even within the ten weeks of this study. This shows that ADI might have a potential use in reducing structural racism and discrimination.