New Directions for Health Data Matters

On January 31, 2021, Cleveland & Cuyahoga Health Data Matters (HDM) will terminate as a website. Going forward, visitors will be redirected to HealthyNeo.org.

Several factors contributed to this decision:

1) When HDM was established in 2015, it was the only site available for comprehensive data on health and social determinants of health of the local population, with breakdowns available for disparity groups of interest and that could be examined at the zip code or census tract level. At this point, there are many sites across the country with some data like this.

2) In 2020, the Health Improvement Partnership established HealthyNeo.org for Cuyahoga and other area counties. Going forward, HDM will redirect to HealthyNeo.org. HealthyNeo.org will be adding HDM public data sets that they don’t currently have, and will reach out to other HDM data contributors to request other data that has not been published or that we maintain at a level of granularity that is not available to the public.

3) I am leaving the University at the end of January. While Scott Frank has been a full and equal partner since shortly after HDM was established, he agrees that transitioning to HealthyNeo.org is the best use of available resources.

We are proud of what Health Data Matters has accomplished in a few short years:

• We provided a single place where definitive and current data from all of the local health departments could be housed. This saved resources that health departments otherwise used to satisfy public requests for data.
• An early champion of health data visualization, we were among the very first, through our partnership with LiveStories, to enable people to create maps and interactive charts without having to have or learn to use GIS and mapping software.
• Anticipating widespread interest in social determinants of health, we made it possible to see the relationship of these determinants to health outcomes, thanks to the rich poverty data provided by NEOCANDO at the Mandel School.
• Anticipating widespread interest in health disparities, we also provided data for subpopulations of interest, such as by race, education or age.
• Anticipating widespread interest in racism as a public health crisis, we called attention, through data stories, to the tremendous segregation in our County, and the compounding impact of poor social determinants of health found in segregated neighborhoods.
• Trained a generation of students (Scott especially!), government officials, and philanthropic and non-profit organizations to use aggregate data to examine population health, health disparities, and social determinants of health through a place-based lens.
• Through the Cleveland Medical Hackathon, Amy trained a generation of health innovators to incorporate public health data consider the impact of their technology public health perspectives, and the value of public health data. She also helped public health organizations see ways to utilize real-time data and apps to streamline operations.
• Scott and Matthew Kucmanic, our former graduate assistant, have identified important trends in opioid deaths, suicide, and requests for social services, thanks to data from the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office and United Way 2-1-1.
• Amy has raised awareness of the digital divide as a hidden social determinant of health that is an example of systemic racism that is likely to further exacerbate health disparities

Finally, the desire to create a visceral Health Data Matters experience inspired the creation of the Neighborhood Immersion for Compassion and Empathy(NICE) Virtual Reality Simulation. Scott and Amy are both keen to facilitate sessions, via the internet for the time being, for groups seeking training to better understand racism, health disparities and the social determinants of health.

THANKS:

We greatly appreciate support from Dean Pamela Davis, the Clinical and Translational Collaborative of Cleveland, the MPH Program and the Department of Population & Quantitative Health Sciences, and the Department of Bioethics for their support, along with The Saint Lukes Foundation and The George Gund Foundation. We appreciate input we’ve received from the site’s visitors—who come from every state in the nation, over 200 Ohio locations, hundreds of K-12 schools and universities, government agencies (federal, state and local), news organizations and private companies. Special thanks to Ben Gorham and Charlie Harper at the Kelvin Smith Library for ARC/ESRI support.

We thank the many students who have served as assistants over the years. At the risk of missing someone, I will mention only Matthew Kucmanic who dug into mapping and was our stalwart go to person for everything. Thanks also to Becky Kairns at the Cuyahoga County Board of Health for procuring and managing our data; and to April Urban for not only providing poverty data but mentoring us based on the long history of NEOCANDO—the true pioneer of community open data.

Finally, thanks to our advisors over the years, (most notably, perhaps, Thomas Love, David Bruckman and Chris Kippes), and our other data donors including the Cleveland Department of Public Health, Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, Better Health Partnership, United Way 2-1-1, The Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods, and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s office.

Other key places to go for LOCAL data include:

Better Health Partnership

Cleveland Department of Public Health

Cuyahoga County Board of Health

Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner

First Year Cleveland

NEOCANDO

United Way 2-1-1

Visualizations of local data can be made on these national sites:

PLACES (formerly: 500 Cities, CDC)

City Data

Data.gov

American Community Survey (Census)

Living Atlas of the World (ArcGIS)

Good luck!

You can find Amy on twitter @amysheon and LinkedIn;

Scott’s contact information remains unchanged.