With the coronavirus crisis sweeping the globe, health data has never been more important.

Almost every news story now features mathematical models and statistics designed to enable health care professionals and government planners to make the right decisions on how and when to make interventions.

But long before the current crisis emerged, the City Health Dashboard was helping to harvest huge amounts of information all pertaining to urban health in specific American cities, the end goal being to deliver the information to health professionals and city leaders at a level of granularity that had never been done before.

“Prior to the Dashboard’s debut, there was not a publicly-available source for city health data; most health data were available at the county or state level,” said Ben Spoer, director of metrics and analytics at City Health Dashboard.

Urban Health Planning

With 80% of Americans living in urban areas, Spoer added that relying on data from non-urban populations did not give an accurate reading of what particular health challenges city-dwellers face.

City Health Dashboard on the other hand, harvests 35 different types of health information from a multitude of sources including life expectancy, obesity, number of children in poverty, clinical care and insurance metrics, education, racial bias, and income — all specific to a particular neighbourhood or city boundary which is updated regularly.

The dashboard empowers cities to identify and intervene upon health challenges by providing the city-specific data required to identify and address these challenges

The City Health Dashboard project started in 2017. A pilot version was developed in close collaboration with four cities, Providence, Rhode Island, Flint, Michigan, Waco, Texas, and Kansas City, Kansas.

Officially launched in May 2018 with 500 large US cities — those with populations greater than 66,000 people — it has recently added 10 small New Jersey cities and this April will add 260 more large cities across the US.

Advanced Datasets

Spoer added that the data itself is culled from a number of large, nationally available datasets. Some of them, like the US Census, which provides data for many of the site’s social and economic factors metrics, or the 500 Cities project data, which provides data for many of its health behaviours metrics, are freely available.

But others, like the National Vital Statistics Systems data, which provides much of the system’s health outcome data, requires a data use agreement with the US government.
They also buy select datasets, for example Parkserve (providing Park Access) and Walkscore.

As well as gathering a wide range of accurate information, simplicity of use was one of the biggest concerns to designers said Spoer.

“The Dashboard data empowers cities to take action on health issues.
“While city leaders possess deep knowledge and expertise about their cities, funders and policymakers often require hard data to justify funding proposals or making policy changes.

“With this in mind, the Dashboard empowers cities to identify and intervene upon health challenges by providing the city-specific data required to identify and address these challenges.”

Informing City Leaders

He cites a number of examples of how the Dashboard has helped inform city leaders to make interventions.

The dashboard drills down into the city’s neighbourhood data to provide a level of clarity and granularity they previously lacked

In their Access to Care working group, community health workers at Prosper Waco, a collective impact initiative in Waco, Texas, have used the Dashboard’s data to design evidence-based preventative health community events in their neighbourhoods, tailored to the population health and social needs of their individual catchment areas.

Using the Dashboard to address low rates of physical activity in underserved areas, the Healthy Communities Office in Providence, Rhode Island discovered that walkability and safety concerns had a greater influence on low activity than obesity itself, which had previously been thought to be its major driver.

The Dashboard measures on walkability were then combined with state data on bikeability to identify barriers and opportunities for increased physical activity in specific neighbourhoods and spur the design of more safe and walkable streets.

And until recently, the Clifton Health Department in New Jersey had had to rely on county-level data from Passaic County to meet its data needs.

Spoer said: “For a city as racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse as Clifton, this information was too broad to truly reflect residents’ health, and thus not local enough to drive change.”

He added the health department now uses the Dashboard to drill down into the city’s neighbourhood data to provide a level of clarity and granularity they previously lacked.

He said: “They’ve been able to use the Dashboard’s quantitative data alongside qualitative surveys from local community health organizations, to highlight equity issues across the city for their Community Health Assessment, part of the process to help them become a nationally accredited local public health department.”

Future Plans

The website has had 88,885 unique users across 132,905 sessions since its launch with plans to expand to additional new cities and add new metrics as public health service priorities shift.

The team are also currently working with colleges and universities to explore how the Dashboard can be used as an educational tool.

He says the team are interested in bringing the Dashboard to other countries, but due to its reliance on secondary data to populate its metrics, it would require countries with robust demographic and health data systems that capture uniform data across multiple cities.

“Many middle-and-low income countries, which could benefit from such a Dashboard, do not yet have these data systems and a funding partner would be needed as well,” he adds. — Mark Smith

(Picture credit: Death to Stock)