Clinical trial deserts
You can only join a clinical trial you can get to. For four common chronic diseases, this maps how far every community is from the nearest site currently recruiting patients for an interventional trial.
Who is more than an hour from a trial
Share of each group living more than an hour's drive from the nearest recruiting site.
How this was estimated
Trials. Every interventional study on ClinicalTrials.gov with overall status "recruiting" that matches the condition search shown, keeping only U.S. sites whose own status is "recruiting". ClinicalTrials.gov places sites at their city's center, so a site dot marks a city, not a building. Pulled .
Drive time. For each of the ~84,000 census tracts, the straight-line distance from the tract's 2020 population center to the nearest recruiting site was converted to driving minutes with a model fitted to real routes:
Disease burden. CDC PLACES county estimates of adults with each condition (crude prevalence × adult population): . Connecticut uses its statewide rate because PLACES reports Connecticut by planning region rather than county.
Groups. Race, ethnicity and social vulnerability come from CDC/ATSDR SVI 2022 (American Community Survey 2018–2022) at the tract level, so group shares describe where people live, not who has the disease. Metro and nonmetro follow USDA's 2023 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes.
Caveats. Living near a site doesn't mean a patient qualifies; eligibility criteria exclude many people, and some trials enroll remotely. Condition searches are broad (for example "cancer" includes every tumor type), so the nearest site may be running a trial for a different form of the disease.
Data and build scripts: github.com/usnish/usnish.github.io.