Open Data Platforms, Mapping Tools Aid Multi-Sector Community Health Efforts

April 11, 2019
Public health leaders in New Mexico, Pennsylvania describe collaborative efforts to visualize data in new ways

Open data platforms are allowing state and local government, researchers and civic groups to bring together and map disparate data sets to analyze problems from new angles. They also are allowing public health and provider groups to work on multi-sector population health issues. In a recent webinar, executives from New Mexico and Pennsylvania described collaborative efforts to visualize data in new ways.

The group “All In: Data for Community Health” is a learning network of communities that are testing new ways to systematically improve community health outcomes through multi-sector partnerships working to share data. It sponsored an April 9 webinar on two community data warehouses that are evolving to support community health improvement.

 Bob Gradeck manages the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social and Urban Research. He works to build relationships with data publishers and users, and also is responsible for the data center’s community engagement efforts. “We now have 20 publishers and a community open data portal for users. We look for opportunities to use data in new and different ways and provide technical assistance to data users,” Gradeck said. “It is a nice way to break down silos between organizations.”

 One user, the Allegheny Data Sharing Alliance for Health created a connected data warehouse that combines data from multiple sectors to create a more complete picture of the factors impacting the cardiovascular health of the county’s 1.2 million residents. “Claims data from insurers was assembled by the Allegheny County Health Department and shared as open data,” Gradeck said. “They packaged the data and put out census-track level summaries. We worked with the health department to make a lot of data about social determinants available, including grocery stores, traffic, and pollution. Members are able to look at cross-sector initiatives.”

 The collaborative has shared and modeled data to better understand factors impacting residents’ cardiovascular health, and is now using the same methodology to reduce asthma emergency room visits.

 Another partner is the Pittsburgh Study, a new community-partnered study to find out what works to help children thrive. The study will follow children in Allegheny County from birth through high school. The project is being led by the UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh.

 The New Mexico Community Data Collaborative is a statewide data warehouse compiling demographic, socioeconomic, health and social determinant data at the neighborhood level. “We have 150 polished maps ready to go based on 600 data sets,”said Thomas Scharmen, community epidemiologist in the Office of Community Assessment, Planning, and Evaluation in the New Mexico Department of Health. The indicators mapped in ArcGIS online cover health outcomes, resources, and social determinants in every neighborhood in the state, allowing exploration of chronic disease, healthcare access, early childhood, built environment, food issues, education and more. Scharmen said an important lesson learned is to make the map creation participatory and conduct planning collectively. “This allows us to take evidence to people who don’t usually look at spreadsheets,” he added.

 As an example, Susan Wilger, associate director of the Southwest Center for Health Innovation, spoke about engaging communities throughout the state in participatory, evidence-based decision making. “The project dealt with how to bridge population health and behavioral health in rural New Mexico. We want people in rural New Mexico to make decisions for themselves.” In four regional gatherings, people saw how geography influences disparities when looking at the behavioral health system. New Mexico has 33 counties, and only seven met the definition of urban. People studied the migration of minority populations in and out of counties in the state. They looked at suicide deaths and substance use rates. Groups could explore regions of the state to get more details on persons with cognitive disability. “The audiences also enjoyed exploring how social determinants of health influence the rural behavioral health system,” Wilger said.

People also studied facilities as an access issue. It is not uncommon in rural New Mexico to travel two or three hours to access a clinic. The maps showed where hospitals and behavioral health clinics and community health centers are and the types of services they offer. After studying the data visualizations, each regional meeting came up with different priorities. “In the Northwest, they were seeing they lacked resources for youth,” Wilger said. “They wanted to focus strategies on youth mentorship programs.” In the Northeast, they wanted to figure out how to improve tribal and county health infrastructure. In the Southwest, they felt that in order to address these needs, more stakeholder engagement was required to choose priorities. In the Southeast people said it was clarifying to see the data in a story map. “That was so much more powerful to the community rather than just looking at data in tables,” Wilger said.

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