American clusters: using machine learning to understand health and health care disparities in the United States

Health and health care access in the United States are plagued by high inequality. While machine learning (ML) is increasingly used in clinical settings to inform health care delivery decisions and predict health care utilization, using ML as a research tool to understand health care disparities in the United States and how these are connected to health outcomes, access to health care, and health system organization is less common. We utilized over 650 variables from 24 different databases aggregated by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in their Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) database. We used