EDK All work

Data modeling · Public health policy

Broadband & Health Outcomes

Which parts of broadband access matter most for health: availability, affordability, or speed?

Read the paper

In brief

With a partner, I built a county-level dataset connecting broadband availability and price with measures including life expectancy, child mortality, diabetes, drug-overdose mortality, food insecurity, and insurance coverage. The goal was not simply to ask whether internet access matters, but to identify which parts of access were most consistently associated with health outcomes.

Tune the connection

No connection. Digital care, information, and services remain out of reach.

County-level map of 25/3 Mbps cable broadband coverage across the mainland United States
01County-level cable coverage at the 25/3 Mbps baseline, one of the speed-and-technology measures used in the analysis.

What I did

  1. 01Combined the FCC’s 2023 National Broadband Map and Urban Rate Survey with 2023 County Health Rankings, standardizing county identifiers, service types, speeds, and provider data.
  2. 02Estimated coverage by technology and speed, then constructed an affordability measure based on the share of a county served by plans below $50 per month.
  3. 03Ran ordinary least squares models across multiple health outcomes and interpreted predictors using significance, direction, and model fit—while accounting for low R² values, self-reported FCC coverage, and assumptions in the affordability calculation.

Key finding

Overall household broadband access was a recurrent significant factor across six health outcomes. Low-price coverage also appeared repeatedly, while speeds above the 25/3 Mbps baseline showed less consistent additional association.