This indicator provides information about medically underserved areas and/or populations (MUA/Ps), as determined by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Each designated area includes multiple census tracts.State Primary Care Offices submit applications to HRSA to designate specific areas within counties as MUA/Ps. The MUA/P designation is made using the Index of Medical Underservice (IMU) score, which includes four components: provider per 1,000 population, percent of population under poverty, percent of population ages 65 years and older, and infant mortality rate. The IMU scores ranges from 0-100. Lower scores indicate higher needs. An IMU score of 62 or below qualifies for designation as an MUA/P. Note: if an area is not designated as an MUA/P, it does not mean it is not underserved, only that an application has not been filed for the area and that official designation has not been given.The MUAs within Los Angeles County consist of groups of urban census tracts (namely service areas). MUPs have a shortage of primary care health services for a specific population within a geographic area. These populations may face economic, cultural, or language barriers to health care, such as: people experiencing homelessness, people who are low-income, people who are eligible for Medicaid, Native Americans, or migrant farm workers. All the MUPs that have been designated within Los Angeles County are among low-income populations of selected census tract groups. Due to the nature of the designation process, a census tract may be designated as both an MUA and an MUP and as multiple MUAs. MUA/P designations help establish health maintenance organizations or community health centers in high-need areas.For more information about the Community Health Profiles Data Initiative, please see the initiative homepage.

This dataset contains the geographic Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) federal designations for Primary Care, Mental Health, and Dental Health. This California-specific data is a subset and snapshot of the complete national data maintained by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). For the full set of variables and most up-to-date information, visit https://data.hrsa.gov/data/download.

Source of update: American Community Survey 5-year 2006-2010 data for poverty. For source tables refer to InfoUSA update procedural documentation. The 2010 MSSA Detail layer was developed to update fields affected by population change. The American Community Survey 5-year 2006-2010 population data pertaining to total, in households, race, ethnicity, age, and poverty was used in the update. The 2010 MSSA Census Tract Detail map layer was developed to support geographic information systems (GIS) applications, representing 2010 census tract geography that is the foundation of 2010 medical service study area (MSSA) boundaries. ***This version is the finalized MSSA reconfiguration boundaries based on the US Census Bureau 2010 Census. In 1976 Garamendi Rural Health Services Act, required the development of a geographic framework for determining which parts of the state were rural and which were urban, and for determining which parts of counties and cities had adequate health care resources and which were "medically underserved". Thus, sub-city and sub-county geographic units called "medical service study areas [MSSAs]" were developed, using combinations of census-defined geographic units, established following General Rules promulgated by a statutory commission. After each subsequent census the MSSAs were revised. In the scheduled revisions that followed the 1990 census, community meetings of stakeholders (including county officials, and representatives of hospitals and community health centers) were held in larger metropolitan areas. The meetings were designed to develop consensus as how to draw the sub-city units so as to best display health care disparities. The importance of involving stakeholders was heightened in 1992 when the United States Department of Health and Human Services' Health and Resources Administration entered a formal agreement to recognize the state-determined MSSAs as "rational service areas" for federal recognition of "health professional shortage areas" and "medically underserved areas". After the 2000 census, two innovations transformed the process, and set the stage for GIS to emerge as a major factor in health care resource planning in California. First, the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development [OSHPD], which organizes the community stakeholder meetings and provides the staff to administer the MSSAs, entered into an Enterprise GIS contract. Second, OSHPD authorized at least one community meeting to be held in each of the 58 counties, a significant number of which were wholly rural or frontier counties. For populous Los Angeles County, 11 community meetings were held. As a result, health resource data in California are collected and organized by 541 geographic units. The boundaries of these units were established by community healthcare experts, with the objective of maximizing their usefulness for needs assessment purposes. The most dramatic consequence was introducing a data simultaneously displayed in a GIS format. A two-person team, incorporating healthcare policy and GIS expertise, conducted the series of meetings, and supervised the development of the 2000-census configuration of the MSSAs.