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Apriqot is a community magnifying glass that enables data-driven decision-making.
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What We Do
Apriqot seeks to improve the health of communities by bringing data to life. We develop health data analytics solutions that combine publicly-available data on demographics, geographics, and public health metrics. Our team has deep expertise in developing neighborhood and census tract-level estimates of health conditions using publicly-available data, health surveys, disease registries, vital records, and administrative records.
Public Health Has a Problem
Health officials lack access to quality local data to inform program and policy decisions.
While many datasets contain some local data, no tool exists that can extract, combine, and transform that data to make it usable at the local level.
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As a result, health officials miss community insights and trends that should be in plain sight, leading to ineffective and inefficient use of limited funds and resources.
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Apriqot Has a Solution
Apriqot is the community magnifying glass missing from the public health data toolkit.
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Apriqot is a demographic and geographic platform upon which local data can be grafted, community-level analysis can be performed, and future-looking models can be constructed.
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Apriqot makes local data usable, allowing stakeholders to zoom in on their local context to detect what is happening, where it's happening, and who is impacted.
Nicole Hewes
Director of Projects & Communications
Tim Masse
Fractional Chief Strategy Officer
Rafael G. Ramos, PhD
Geospatial Consultant
Orijeet Mukherjee
Machine Learning Engineer
Northeastern Co-op Hall of Fame
Xinyan Liu
Data & Software Engineer
2024
Our Advisors
Our Projects
Mapping Food Insecurity in Southern Maine with MaineHealth and the City of Portland
Apriqot is engaged with MaineHealth and Portland Public Health for a series of projects, the first of which is generating population estimates for indicators of food security in Cumberland and York County that are both geographically and demographically downscaled. This project will help improve the food security of Southern Maine residents.
Medical Baseline Program Eligibility with California’s Investor-Owned Utilities
In conjunction with Verdant Associates (a California-based consulting agency), we will produce customer eligibility estimates for a Medical Baseline program offered by California's four investor-owned utilities. For this project, we are creating estimates of the proportion of the population whose health condition or use of a medical device may qualify them to receive energy discounts. Ultimately, these estimates will aid the four utilities with their Medical Baseline program outreach and enrollment efforts.
Alzheimer’s Surveillance and Detection with the
Maine CDC
We are producing geographically detailed estimates of the burden of Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (ADRD) at the sub-county level in Maine. These estimates will assist the MaineCDC with surveillance and detection of ADRD in Maine communities and provide insights to help them allocate their public health resources and outreach efforts effectively. This work is supported by a Roux Institute Accelerator Grant.
Why Are We Called Apriqot?
There are many different reasons why we’re called Apriqot.
First, we like apricots!
But we also named our company Apriqot because apricots kept coming up while we were developing the idea. For example, Apriqot establishes and maintains many copies of the places we are characterizing, kind of like an ORCHARD. And within each characterization (a TREE) there are many individuals (like the APRICOTS). We also call the process of bringing in users’ local data and merging it with our data GRAFTING, and some of the methods we use to produce estimates use something called a KERNEL.
Also, we like that apricot is a color, which makes some decisions a lot easier (e.g., what color should our logo be?)
And apricots have a nice blush to them which makes them look a little like people.
But the real reason we are called Apriqot is a bit more convoluted. In public health, one typically uses “p” for the probability of having some condition or disease. If you are talking about a lot of people in community, then pit would be the probability of the ith person have the disease at time t. And if you wanted to talk about the average probability, you might use pot , pronounced “p naught t,” as the average probability of having the disease at time t. So the chance of not having a condition is 1-p, but that is also called q. So qot is the average probability of not having the condition or disease in the community– the probability of being well. That is the “-qot,”
And we added that to one of the most boring names that we thought of and didn’t use as our company name: “Applied Population Research Inc.” 🥱
And that is why we’re called Apriqot. Now if we could just figure out how it’s pronounced - ape-ricot or ah-pricot… Let us know what you think.
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