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PCCI upgrades its Community Vulnerability Compass with Access to Vital Services and Mobility Mapping features, allowing for expanded usability of community data

02/25/2026

DALLAS - The Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI) has announced a significant update to its innovative Community Vulnerability Compass (CVC),which now includedata on Access to Vital Services (AVS) and Mobility Mapping, offering users additional insights on the health and social conditions affecting communities across the state of Texas.

The CVC is an industry-leading visualization tool highlightingnon-medical drivers of health such as food insecurity,income, andtransportation access.With the added functionality of Access to Vital Services and Mobility Mapping, CVC users not only have a clearview of resources available in a neighborhood but alsoan outlook on where residents from limited-access or high-vulnerability areas travel to obtain such resources and services.

If you use the CVC, you can now more readily predict blockgroup-level social vulnerability and unmet service needs to inform targeted interventions,” said Lance Rather, PCCI’s Senior Director, Product & Strategic Partnerships. “The AVS featureis extremely helpful for healthcare systems, community-based organizations, and funders in optimizing referral pathways, site placement, and resource allocation informed by place-based access constraintsThe Mobility Mapping connects the AVS data by identifying major mobility corridors, informing decisions such as mobile clinic placement, service expansion, transportation planning, and targeted community outreach.These are powerful new elements of the CVCbolstering its presence asa single source of truth for understanding social and structural vulnerabilities across communities.”

Figure1: Understanding community needs requires more than measuring vulnerability alone. By analyzing vulnerability alongside access to vital services and the mobility or visits to those services we can see the full picture of where needs exist what resources are available and how effectively communities can connect to them.


Details for AVS and Mobile Mapping include:

Access to Vital Services (AVS)

  • Visualizes resources available at the neighborhood level, highlighting variation in proximity and service coverage across domains such as food, childcare, transportation, behavioral health, and primary care.

  • Connects service access with underlying community vulnerability, enabling organizations to understand where high-need populations face structural barriers and how to prioritize outreach, partnerships, and investments as well asidentifying services for clientele they may have that have other needs.

  • Informs targeted intervention and strategic planning, supporting healthcare systems, community-based organizations (CBOs), and funders in optimizing referral pathways, site placement, and resource allocation based on place-based access constraints.


Mobility Mapping

  • Leverages privacy-preserving, population mobility indicators generated from aggregated location data to understand real-world movement patterns related to accessing vital services, without identifying or tracking individuals.

  • Enables flexible filtering by day of week, time of day, residential ZIP Code, and type of vital service accessed, allowing users to analyze how, when, and where residents travel for care and support.

  • Reveals where residents from limited-access or high-vulnerability areas go for services and identifies major mobility corridors, informing use cases such as mobile clinic placement, service expansion, transportation planning, and targeted community outreach.


Since its creation, the 
CVC’s interactive dashboard has revealed actionable insights about the health of multiple communities across Texas. More than 80 organizations have leveraged the tool to observe insights and make informed decisions that enhance outcomes and drive equity in service deliveryLearn more about the development of the CVC in PCCI’s recent publication in JAMIA, which highlights how the CVC elevates insights and expandsupon the performance of existing tools that measure community socioeconomic variation. Access the full research paper here:
The Community Vulnerability Compass: a novel, scalable approach for measuring and visualizing social determinants of health insights.

To explore how the tool can support your work, PCCI is offering a free interactive demonstration. To contact us for more information or to set up a demo, email PCCI at: info@pccinnovation.org.

About PCCI

The Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI) is a not-for-profit, mission-driven organization with industry-leading expertise in the responsible application of artificial intelligence, machine learning and non-medical drivers of health data modeling to address the needs of vulnerable populations. PCCI started as a department within Parkland Health and was spun out as an independent organization in 2012. PCCI strives to leapfrog the status quo by harnessing the transformative potential of data. Our unique capabilities allow us to provide innovative, actionable solutions that more effectively identify needs, prioritize services, empower providers, and engage patients.

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