61.7%
Fragile access statewide
612 of 992 analyzed tracts are already pharmacy deserts or would become one with a single closure. That's 2.65 million Oregonians one shutdown away from losing local access.
Across Oregon, 40.6% of census tracts meet the criteria for a pharmacy desert — leaving roughly 1.74 million people more than a mile from urban access or 10 miles from rural access to medication. This interactive map lets you explore every neighborhood and pharmacy in the state.
Click any neighborhood to see desert status, demographics, and the nearest pharmacy distance. Click a pharmacy marker for its name, type, and address.
612 of 992 analyzed tracts are already pharmacy deserts or would become one with a single closure. That's 2.65 million Oregonians one shutdown away from losing local access.
More than half of rural tracts qualify as pharmacy deserts, compared with 41.0% of urban tracts. Rural tracts are 2.0× more likely to be a desert (p<0.001).
Eighty-one tracts are both pharmacy deserts and in the top quartile of social vulnerability — communities facing the steepest combined access and equity challenges.
153 of 418 tracts in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties are deserts — Washington (55.2%) is hit hardest, then Clackamas (41.4%) and Multnomah (21.8%).
SVI Theme 4 (Housing Type / Transportation) shows the strongest correlation with desert status of any vulnerability dimension — pointing to mobility as a leverage point for policy.
Combined Oregon Board of Pharmacy, NPPES, and OpenStreetMap records into a deduplicated layer — every retail, hospital, mail-order, and clinic-based pharmacy in the state.
Counties ranked by percentage of tracts classified as pharmacy deserts. Hover or tap a row to see the population estimate.
| County | Desert tracts | % of tracts | Population in deserts | Bar |
|---|
This study applies the Mathis et al. (2025) definition of a pharmacy desert, adapted for census-tract geography in Oregon. A tract is a pharmacy desert if its population-weighted centroid satisfies any of the following:
Distances are measured from the tract's population-weighted centroid using projected Oregon Lambert (EPSG:2992) coordinates for accuracy. Drive time is estimated using urbanicity-adjusted travel speeds.
This is a Health Informatics Capstone Project in the University of Illinois, Chicago Master of Health Informatics program. Brandon is also a PharmD candidate at Pacific University School of Pharmacy in Hillsboro, Oregon.
The project combines informatics, public health surveillance methods, and pharmacy practice research to surface the geographic and social dimensions of medication access in Oregon. Brandon brings expertise from managed care, healthcare administration, and regulatory affairs consulting.
The work serves as the basis of his capstone project and has been accepted for poster presentations at: