A child's risk of ending up in the hospital may depend less on their ZIP code and more on the specific house they live in, according to a Cincinnati Children's Hospital study that maps hospitalization risk to every residential address in the city.

The research, published in March in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, used machine-learning models to connect address-level data to pediatric hospital admissions. The three strongest predictors: a home's market value, nearby violent crime and housing code violations.

For east-side families heading into the new school year, the findings offer a data-driven lens on how the roughly 77,000 residential addresses across Cincinnati, including those in Hyde Park, Oakley and Mount Lookout, stack up in terms of children's health risk.

"Instead of saying which neighborhoods would have higher rates of X or Y, it would be which specific homes over the course of a decade have had higher rates of hospitalization," co-researcher Dr. Cole Brokamp told the Cincinnati Enquirer on Aug. 11. Brokamp is a faculty member in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Cincinnati Children's.

How the tool works

Carson Hartlage, a doctoral candidate in biomedical informatics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, led the study. His team reviewed more than 10,000 electronic health records from children admitted to Cincinnati Children's between July 2016 and June 2022, matching those admissions to 5,700 unique addresses.

They then layered in publicly available data from the Hamilton County Auditor, the Cincinnati Department of Buildings and Inspections, the Cincinnati Police Department, census records, Eviction Lab filings and Ohio Department of Health birth records.

Out of roughly 77,000 residential addresses citywide, 7.4% were flagged as higher risk, meaning at least one child hospitalization occurred there during the study period. A related Cincinnati Children's study found children living in a home with a housing code infraction in the past year were 34% more likely to be hospitalized for asthma the following year.

Not yet available to families

Families cannot yet look up their own address.

The tool is not publicly available, and the researchers have framed it as a guide for health systems, city agencies and community organizations rather than a consumer product. Potential applications include city inspectors prioritizing housing code enforcement, health systems flagging children for preventive asthma care and community groups targeting services to specific blocks.

The research connects directly to an existing Cincinnati Children's program. The Child Health-Law Partnership, known as Child HeLP, pairs hospital staff with attorneys from the Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio to address housing, insurance and benefits issues for families. Since launching in 2008, Child HeLP has served more than 24,000 children and recovered over $2.2 million in public benefits.

Rachel Barr, team lead attorney at Legal Aid who manages the partnership's legal side, appeared alongside Hartlage on WVXU's Cincinnati Edition on Aug. 17, to discuss the study's implications. In a Harvard Law School article published earlier in 2026, Barr noted that "Cincinnati's housing stock is old, and there's not enough of it," and that post-pandemic housing referrals through the partnership have spiked.

A 2022 Health Affairs study of the Child HeLP program found that children who received legal intervention had a median predicted hospitalization rate 37.9% lower than those who did not.

What east-side families can do

The researchers acknowledged a limitation: reporting patterns around code violations and crime don't always reflect the places with the greatest need, which can affect accuracy in neighborhoods where complaints go unfiled.

Hyde Park, Oakley and Mount Lookout families concerned about housing conditions affecting their children's health can contact the Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio or ask their pediatrician about a Child HeLP referral. Brokamp said the next step could include adapting the framework to predict emergency department visits or identify homes with lead service lines in need of renovation.