Faces Behind Big Data

The Faces Behind the Data Horacio Chacón Torrico, ’22, wants to help the people who may be forgotten in global health data

DENNIS WISE

“Every row in a data set represents a human life, or a disease, or some problem,” says Horacio Chacón Torrico. “I think we forget that, and I try not to.” In March 2021, Horacio Chacón Torrico arrived in Seattle to begin his second year of graduate studies at the UW School of Public Health, after two quarters completed remotely from his home in Lima, Peru. Within a week, he received his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. But as he scrolled through his Facebook feed, he saw posts from friends in Peru who grieved loved ones lost to the pandemic.

Chacón Torrico felt guilt at having so easily received his vaccine, when so many from his home country were suffering. But he also felt a resolve to understand why. Why did Peru have the highest mortality rate per capita from the pandemic? And how could public-health data be applied to improve outcomes and health equity around the world?

Questions like these fueled his research for his master’s in global health, which he completed in June. He is interested in the intersection of technology, data and public health— and how to better use data to reach communities in middle- and low-income countries, which are often ignored when broad assumptions are made about the health of a population.

“A lot of people are being forgotten because of averages,” he says, “so I want to find solutions for global health to measure, at the finest resolution, the health of people who are forgotten.”

LESSONS IN THE AMAZON

Before Chacón Torrico came to the UW, he was a physician in Peru and studied biomedical informatics. He first fell in love with data as a medical data analyst, learning how to answer big public-health questions with information from health records.

He also saw how important data could be for underserved communities when he worked in the Amazon jungle on a program called Mamás del Río (Mothers of the River), during his master’s studies at Cayetano Heredia University in Peru.

In these remote areas, where traveling to the nearest health center required a 5- to 10-hour boat ride, Chacón Torrico was tasked with creating a data framework to help support maternal and newborn health. The result was the use of tablets to track everyone who was pregnant, identify their risk levels, and share tailored messages for each stage of pregnancy and postpartum.

While global health aims to share life-improving information with communities, the field must also learn from those communities. On a 110-degree day, Chacón Torrico was working in a village when he heard someone shout, “Fire!” A building was burning. The 100 residents quickly formed a bucket brigade to pass water from the river to extinguish the fire.

But that’s not what happened during COVID-19, Chacón Torrico says. The global community did not work together to extinguish fires burning around the world from the pandemic. Many people and places were left to fend for themselves.

A GLOBAL EDUCATION

While data analysis was becoming the centerpiece of Chacón Torrico’s mission to improve health care for underserved populations, he wanted to advance his technical skills and increase his understanding of global health.

He chose the UW for graduate school because of the reputation of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) as a champion in describing, mapping and measuring health