“PolicyMap has played an incredibly important role in helping Vitamin Angels to identify the communities where our work is needed most and in turn, has helped us reach even more underserved pregnant women with the prenatal vitamins they need to have a healthy pregnancy.” — Colleen Delaney, PhD, RDN, Technical Director for US Programs
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Challenge

Vitamin Angels is a global public health nonprofit working to improve maternal and child nutrition worldwide. In the U.S., the organization collaborates with over 300 local community partners including WIC sites, federally qualified health centers, public health departments, and domestic violence support organizations to distribute prenatal vitamins to underserved pregnant women who experience barriers to accessing essential nutrition.

One of Vitamin Angels’ biggest challenges is identifying where they can reach underserved women in the U.S. While they have typically relied on their network of community partners and the Social Vulnerability Index, the organization sought a more sophisticated approach to helping them pinpoint gaps in access to essential nutrition and healthcare across the U.S.

Solution

While exploring data solutions, Vitamin Angels discovered PolicyMap as a source for curated, cleaned, normalized data ready for integration and analysis. PolicyMap’s vast data ecosystem immediately eliminated the need for time-intensive data collection, so the organization could shift efforts to identifying communities where mothers experience barriers to accessing prenatal vitamins and targeting zip codes for intervention based on need. Vitamin Angels also uses PolicyMap's curated Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) data menu to browse and select relevant datasets.

To improve and grow its prenatal vitamin program in the United States, Vitamin Angels is developing a scoring system designed to optimize the populations served and the site selection of community partners. The score will incorporate PolicyMap data including the number of women of reproductive age, poverty indicators, immigrant statuses, healthcare access, maternity care target areas, healthcare professional shortage areas, medically underserved areas, and more.

Vitamin Angels also uses PolicyMap to evaluate the impact of their interventions, tracking the number of uninsured women in a community and monitoring prenatal vitamin bottle distribution. By quantifying their efforts, Vitamin Angels ensures that donors are well-informed and enthusiastic about contributing to their mission.

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