Equitable Access to Burn Care in the United States: Reflections on the HeatMap Hackathon Finals

Written by: Professor Pinar Karaca-Mandic

There are moments in academic and community life when you realize something genuinely important just happened. The final presentations of the HeatMap Hackathon 2026 were one of those moments for me.

I attended the finals this week wearing multiple hats — as a board member of HealthcareMN, as Founding Director of the Business Advancement Center for Health (BACH) at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management and School of Public Health, and honestly, just as someone who cares deeply about whether healthcare data actually reaches people who need it.

The Collaboration That Made This Possible

The HeatMap Hackathon was organized by BData in partnership with HealthcareMN, the American Burn Association and supported by a remarkable coalition: University of Minnesota's BACH, AI Hub, and Department of Statistics, and MNanalytics. Participating institutions ranged from UMN and UW-Madison to Johns Hopkins and Dartmouth — a truly multi-institutional effort.

The original goal was 40 participants. The response: 90+ applicants, with registrations closing early. That alone tells you something about the hunger for this kind of work. Over two months, 19 teams — undergraduate and graduate students in data science, public health, engineering, and medicine, alongside early- and mid-career professionals and clinicians — dug into real-world data to generate solutions with real implications for care delivery.

The challenge area for the top three teams: equitable access to burn care in the United States. It sounds technical. What it actually means is this: every year, approximately 600,000 Americans experience burn injuries requiring emergency care — and whether they survive often depends not on the severity of their injury, but on the zip code where it happened.

The Top Three Teams: What They Built

"Burn Care Access Crisis in America"

This team opened with a question that should haunt every health policy conversation: "Does where you live determine whether you survive a burn injury?" Their answer, drawn from the National Injury Resource Database (NIRD), was an unambiguous yes.

They constructed a Composite Vulnerability Index (CVI) — weighted across access (35%), quality (25%), capacity (25%), and population vulnerability (15%) — and applied it to every state. The findings were stark: 7 states have zero adult burn centers. 34 states fall into the "critical" vulnerability tier, with a CVI above 0.65. And 88.1% of all trauma centers — including 62.4% of Level I trauma centers — lack burn care capability entirely. These hospitals see burn patients. They simply cannot treat them.

But the team didn't stop at diagnosis. They identified 351 high-priority tele-burn hub candidates nationally, modeled three concrete intervention pathways, and projected that a combined strategy — telemedicine deployment, expanded ABA verification, and new center establishment — could reach 14,514 additional patients per year and generate $24 million in annual cost savings from avoidable infections alone. This was not a student project. This was a policy roadmap.

"Burn Equity Index"

This team built something methodologically elegant: the Burn Equity Index (BEI), a census-tract-level composite score measuring structural inequity in burn care access — not who gets burned, but how equitably the system is positioned to respond.

Their formula, combining supply scarcity, timely access burden, pediatric access gap, and structural capacity — was computed for all 1,505 Minnesota census tracts and scaled nationally to 3,144 counties.

The Minnesota findings hit close to home. The median travel time for rural Minnesotans to reach a burn center: 124 minutes — more than six times the urban median of 19 minutes. Only 52% of the state's population lives within 30 minutes of burn care. The 25 highest-burden tracts are concentrated in northwestern and north-central counties, each with a BEI score of 100 — the worst possible — affecting small rural communities of 1,000 to 5,000 residents. The Twin Cities metro is well-served. But disparities widen sharply the moment you leave it.

Nationally, the Great Plains, Appalachia, and the rural Deep South carry the heaviest burden. Alaska (BEI 97.3), North Dakota (95.7), and Montana (94.8) top the worst-ranked states. The team built their index using a two-step floating catchment area method with empirically grounded distance-decay weights — methodologically rigorous work that held up to scrutiny.

"Bridging Burn Care Gaps"

The third finalist team took a complementary, action-first approach. Rather than building a composite index, they asked a direct operational question: if we could upgrade exactly three facilities to add burn care capability, which ones would generate the greatest impact?

They generated 50,000 demand points across the U.S. — first distributed uniformly (geographic equity lens), then proportional to county populations (population equity lens) — and modeled which existing trauma centers without burn care would capture the most underserved demand if upgraded.

The geographic approach identified the northwestern region — spanning Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and the Dakotas — as a near-total void in burn care access. Their top three priority sites: St. Luke's Boise Medical Center, Monument Health Rapid City Hospital, and St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings. The population-weighted approach surfaced a different set of priorities: Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, Spartanburg Medical Center, and Erlanger Baroness Hospital in Chattanooga. Upgrading the geographic trio would extend timely access to roughly 697,000 people; the population-based trio, to over 2 million.

What Stayed With Me

Sitting in that room, I kept thinking about how often academic expertise and community need exist in parallel — close enough to see each other, rarely close enough to actually touch. The HeatMap Hackathon forced that contact. Students who have never run a burn unit built tools that burn care policymakers could genuinely use. Clinicians who live inside the system every day got to see it mapped, indexed, and interrogated from the outside. And a question that might otherwise remain buried in a journal — does geography determine survival? — became something a room full of people wrestled with together, in real time, with real data.

As a board member of HealthcareMN and the founding director of BACH, this is precisely the kind of work I believe we exist to catalyze — bringing rigorous academic expertise into direct contact with real-world problems, in genuine partnership with the community. This is what purposeful university-community engagement looks like in practice.

Congratulations to all 19 teams. Congratulations to BData, the American Burn Association, HealthCareMN, and every partner who made this happen. And to the three finalist teams: what you built matters. Keep going.