Adult Dental Visitation Trends in Tennessee - From Parity to Disparity
Data analysis and stakeholder reporting · CDC BRFSS data, 1999–2020 · Seven custom visualizations
The problem
Public health agencies allocate outreach and resources based on population health indicators — but oral health surveillance data arrives as dense federal tables that are hard to act on. I built a report, framed for the Shelby County Health Department, that turns two decades of CDC data into something a planner can read in ten minutes and make decisions from.
What I did
I pulled adult dental visitation data from the CDC Oral Health Data Dashboard, drawn from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, covering all eleven reporting years from 1999 to 2020. I framed five research questions — one on trends over time, four on disparities by education, income, race and ethnicity, age, and sex — then built seven visualizations, each in a different format chosen for the specific comparison it carries.
A big-number callout opens with the current gap. A line chart carries the historical trajectory. A pictograph makes the education gradient visible at a glance. A lollipop chart handles income, a dumbbell plot handles age, a grouped bar chart handles race and ethnicity, and a slope graph handles sex. The sequence moves deliberately from broad context to specific comparison, so a reader grasps the scope of the problem before seeing where it falls hardest.
What it found
Tennessee matched the national dental visitation rate as recently as 2004, then dropped sharply between 2004 and 2006 and has never recovered. The widest disparity in the dataset is income: Tennessee adults earning under $15,000 a year visit the dentist at 28.2% — sixteen points below their national peers, and less than half the rate of Tennesseans earning $50,000 or more.
The report closes with four recommended actions, an explicit limitations section on what BRFSS data can and cannot establish, and a plan for presenting the findings to department stakeholders.