Friday, December 4, 2015

The HealthLandscape Crew Continues to Grow

Say “Hello!” to our new User Engagement Specialist!


If you have requested help using the UDS Mapper or attended any of our monthly webinars you have already had the pleasure of meeting Claire Meehan.


Claire Meehan received her B.S in Health, Fitness and Recreation Resources with a Concentration in Health Promotion at George Mason University. Prior to joining HealthLandscape she assisted in managing workplace health initiatives for a non-profit hospital.


Her primary responsibilities for HealthLandscape include customer support and user engagement. She provides training and technical support to users as well as manages communications and marketing efforts for HealthLandscape.

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Welcome!

Jennifer Rankin
Senior Manager, Research and Product Services
HealthLandscape

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

GIS Day, 2015

GIS Day has been celebrated annually on the third Wednesday of November since 1999. Over the past 16 years, it has grown from a small, informal celebration to an international phenomenon, with over 1,000 events taking place around the world.



The goal of the celebration is to show off all of the amazing things that can be done with GIS. Organizations and companies across multiple industries use the same technology to tell their very different stories, and this gives us a chance to take a look around and see what's going on in the world around us.

Head over to Twitter and browse through the #GISDay posts to find new and interesting ways that GIS is helping us to understand our world. Some of my personal favorites:

The Bear Trust International Bears of the World story map, created by our friends at Blue Raster. The Bear Trust wanted to create lessons centered around bear research and ecology.



The MapED open data homepage - a central location for accessing the vast data collections of the US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.



This Climate Connections map, and the rest of the ISTE Mapping collection housed by PBS.



When it comes to GIS, there really is something for everyone, wherever your interests lie.


Jené Grandmont
Senior Manager, Application Development and Data Services
HealthLandscape

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Everything That’s Old is New Again

You’ve been hearing a lot about population health, social determinants of health and community vital signs lately from the team here at HealthLandscape.  That’s because we are hearing about it a lot lately from you.

We are currently working on a number of projects that help health care researchers and providers access these data.  We are working on projects that make these community-level data available at the patient level so that practices can understand the community from which they are drawing patients; so that providers have community context for the patient sitting in front of them; so that researchers can better understand community-level effects on patient outcomes.  To these ends, we have developed the Community Vital Signs API which will geocode and geoenrich patient-level, clinical information systems’ data.  For more information, please visit: http://communityvitalsigns.healthlandscape.org/

I was honored to be invited to speak at the Osteopathic Medical Conference and Exposition as part of a two-hour session discussing the old concept of Community Oriented Primary Care (COPC) in their Medical Informatics section.  This old concept of treating the whole community, not just the patients that show up in the doctor’s office, is the foundation of all the current interest in patient- and community-centeredness in medicine.   It’s exciting to be part of the movement that may finally help COPC find its footing in mainstream health care circles.  In our session, we discussed how one medical school is training providers to learn how to incorporate these community-level data into treatment decisions and see them as just as important as weight, blood pressure and heart rate.  We showed providers who were not trained in these methods how they can access the community-level data and begin to integrate them into their practices.

This is a part of ongoing work that started with the Robert Graham Center and the National Association of Community Health Centers a few years ago.  If you would like to learn more about that or access a full curriculum to help you learn the tenets of COPC, please visit: http://www.graham-center.org/rgc/maps-data-tools/tools/copc.html

 If you would like to learn more about the work that HealthLandscape is doing related to Community Vital Signs, Social Determinants of Health, or Community Oriented Primary Care, contact Jennifer Rankin, jrankin@healthlandscape.org or Mark Carrozza, mcarrozza@healthlandscape.org.  We’d love to discuss it with you.

Jennifer Rankin
Senior Manager, Research and Product Services
HealthLandscape

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

What Counts? Data Forum Focuses on Innovations in Population Health

How do we move from data to action? I’m excited to be joined by a series of speakers this Thursday (October 29th) at Data! Fostering Health Innovation in Kentucky and Ohio in Erlanger, KY, where we will be exploring this question and presenting recent innovations in improving population health.

As part of a panel focusing on the validity and use of data to address social determinants, I’ll be presenting HealthLandscape’s most recent work on Community Vital Signs, an approach for incorporating community indicators into electronic health records.  Also joining me on the panel are Katie Bachmeyer from Starfire, and Dr. Robert Kahn from Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital.
Keynote speakers for the conference include Niall Brennan, the Chief Data Officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Naomi Cytron, Senior Research Associate in the Community Development Department for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
 
Michael Topmiller
Health GIS Research Specialist 
HealthLandscape 
 

Thursday, October 15, 2015

HealthLandscape Learning Opportunities


If you have been following HealthLandscape, you are well aware that there are many exciting applications and tools that HealthLandscape has to offer. If you are feeling overwhelmed or are just hungry for more information, come join us for our webinars! Learn more about our online mapping tools, available functions and data, and their potential uses. Below are the webinars HealthLandscape will be demonstrating through the end of the year. Whether you are hoping to develop your professional or personal capabilities, we encourage you to take advantage of these FREE opportunities to learn more about HealthLandscape.


Webinar Title
Date
Day
Time (Eastern)
Registration Link
Advanced Use of the UDS Mapper
10/20/2015
Tuesday
2:00 PM
ACO Quality Explorer
10/27/2015
Tuesday
2:00 PM
Medicare Data Portal
10/27/2015
Tuesday
11:00 AM
Introduction to HealthLandscape
11/2/2015
Monday
2:00 PM
HVBP Explorer
11/3/2015
Tuesday
2:00 PM
Introduction to the UDS Mapper
11/6/2015
Friday
2:00 PM
Advanced Use of the UDS Mapper
11/19/2015
Thursday
11:00 AM
Appalachia Data Portal & Readmissions Explorer
12/1/2015
Tuesday
2:00 PM
Introduction to HealthLandscape
12/3/2015
Thursday
2:00 PM
Introduction to the UDS Mapper
12/9/2015
Wednesday
11:00 AM
Advanced Use of the UDS Mapper
12/14/2015
Monday
2:00 PM

If our webinars do not address your concerns do not hesitate to Contact Us for a personalized webinar. We are proud of HealthLandscape and are always excited to teach those who are eager to learn!

Claire Meehan
User Engagement Specialist
HealthLandscape 

For more information on Healthlandscape click here

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Looking Inward, Looking Outward

Looking Inward: How we measure and use Vital Signs

'Hæmostaticks' and the History of Blood Pressure

In the early years of the 18th century, Stephen Hall began experiments involving horses, brass pipes, and eight foot lengths of glass tubing, that allowed him to measure the force exerted by the horse’s heart with each beat.  These somewhat gruesome experiments would lead to what we know today as the measurement of blood pressure.  Several hundred years of experimentation with various invasive and non-invasive measures and machines ultimately led us to the modern Sphygmomanometer, which provides accurate measures of blood pressure without the inconvenience of spurting blood and the accompanying mess.

Blood pressure is a common Physical Vital Sign, measured routinely in physicians’ offices, hospitals, and even in patient homes for routine blood pressure monitoring.  The standard Sphygmomanometer, with glass tubing and mercury, is quickly being replaced with digital devices that quickly provide accurate measurement.  We understand how a person’s age, weight, body temperature, and even body positioning impact blood pressure.

Just as important as accurate measurement, this information is actionable.  

Blood pressure is a common and critical measure of a person’s physical health and we’ve developed detailed goals and treatment plans that include include both pharmacological and nonpharmacological approaches.  We know when a person is prehypertensive, we know when to expect elevated results (after trauma or while smoking), we know how much medication to give at certain levels of hypertension, and when it can be reasonably controlled with diet and exercise.

It has been 300 years in the making, but we’ve gotten very good at using this important Physical Vital Sign.

Looking Outward: How can we measure and use Community Vital Signs?

We’re now on the cusp of a new direction in healthcare, by looking outward at the community where an individual lives, works, plays, and travels.

We know that poverty is an important community vital sign that impacts a person's health, but we have much to learn.  Are we measuring poverty correctly?  Should we focus on individual/household poverty, or poverty level of their community?  What IS community?  Is community their immediate neighborhood, their city, their county?  When we measure poverty, do we really want to know availability of economic resources, better measured by wealth?  Is economic capital more or less important than social capital -- the intangible, usable social networks a family can take advantage of?  What about walkability?  Residential segregation?  More comprehensive summary measures in the Social Deprivation Index developed by researchers at Australian National University and the Robert Graham Center?

We’ve learned a lot in recent decades, but we have along way to go, before we can match the success of Stephen Hale and his original 'Hæmostaticks' research.

Where do we go from here?

This is not meant to be at all discouraging.  This is an incredibly exciting time to be doing research on social determinants of health, or what we refer to as Community Vital Signs.  We’re collaborating with organisations like the Robert Graham Center and OCHIN to tackle this field of study, by creating innovative tools like the HealthLandscape Geoenrichment API, which can be used to geocode and enrich patient records to include a host of Community Vital Signs

We’re also developing web-based applications that present the Community Vital Signs data in clinical environments to help healthcare providers integrate the social and medical needs of patients, to improve community and patient care.

Mark Carrozza
Director
HealthLandscape


Related Reading:

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Esri Health Conference, 2015

Mark Carrozza, Dirctor of HealthLandscape, recently blogged about the idea that "Place Matters," especially when it comes to health and health care. It was fitting, then, that HealthLandscape had two presentations on the agenda at this year's Esri Health Conference, which was themed "Making Place Matter."




Our first presentation was an overview of two HealthLandscape tools - The Medicare Data Portal and Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Explorer. The aim of these tools is to help put the power of geographic visualization in the hands of researchers and policy makers. 

The Medicare Data Portal engages decision-makers and researchers with county and Hospital Referral Region (HRR) data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) Geographic Variation database and the Chronic Conditions Warehouse. Users are able to visualize health outcome, cost, and demographic data for the Medicare population using maps, graphs, and trend charts. Users also have the ability to examine the relationship between two indicators (for example, Inpatient Costs and Diabetes) with side-by-side maps and a comparison tool that uses percentiles to visualize the relationship between variables. Users can choose from over 100 indicators across 6 categories, including Medicare Population data, Chronic Conditions, Utilization, Costs, Multiple Chronic Conditions, and Dartmouth Measures.






The ACO Explorer presents data for 211 Accountable Care Organizations, or ACOs. As part of the Affordable Care Act, new models of health care delivery have been developed, aimed at improving the quality of care while reducing costs. ACOs are being touted as potential solutions for the inefficiency and fragmentation of the U.S. healthcare system.  ACOs are made up of groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers that coordinate care for Medicare beneficiaries. The tool allows users to visualize 33 quality metrics across five domains, which are compared against benchmarks set by CMS. Each point represents an accountable care organization. When you hover over or click on a specific site, flared rollover windows will appear that contain data about the quality measures included in each of the five domains, which will be colored red, yellow, or green based on their value respective to the thresholds. 

This set of tools can be accessed at www.healthlandscape.org/ACOExplorer/map.cfm. For more detailed information, check out our previous blog post, or sign up for an upcoming webinar.





In addition to the more traditional paper sessions, the conference plenary session featured a round of Lightning Talks, where each presenter had a strict 5 minute window in which to present their ideas. Mark presented the HealthLandscape GeoEnrichment API, a HIPAA-compliant Data as a Service (DaaS) solution that appends multiple geographic identifiers and small-area community characteristics to individual data. This project involves integrating social determinants of health data into patient level data to yield a broader view of the environmental and social risks specific to each patient by indicating whether patient lives in the presence of factors such as poverty, healthy food sources, walkable streets and parks, social capital, and much more.  



We're very excited about all of the possible applications of this simple, but powerful, tool, and we look forward to sharing our ideas and plans in future blog posts.




Jené Grandmont
Senior Manager, Application Development and Data Services
HealthLandscape

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

UDS Mapper Update: New Data and Features!



The UDS Mapper is the premier tool built on the HealthLandscape platform.  Designed to visualize areas of potential need for new federally funded health centers, the UDS Mapper continues to be updated and grow each year.  This year is no exception.  On August 20th, we rolled out the newest version of the UDS Mapper with updated and new data, and improved functionality.

The UDS Mapper is now using data from 2014 showing where patients come from to receive services at health centers.  These health centers are funded by or affiliated with the Health Center Program of the Bureau of Primary Health Care, Health Resources and Services Administration.  Each organization completes a detailed report on the patients they see each year in the Uniform Data System (UDS).  Health Centers report on a calendar year basis and those data are cleaned and aggregated before being uploaded into the UDS Mapper.
 
In addition to having the newest health center data available, this year we are excited to be able to include information about patients based on their insurance status.  These data have only been reported by health centers for the past two years in the UDS Report.  Now UDS Mapper users can visualize where there are pockets of people by insurance status in communities, how well health centers are reaching them, where there are pockets of unmet need, and what changes have occurred over the past year. With these maps we can start to see if health centers are losing uninsured patients, gaining patients with insurance coverage, or gaining patients who remain uninsured having found no insurance coverage under Medicaid or in the Marketplaces.

Additional data that are available for health centers include whether they have received certification as a Patient-Centered Medical Home, whether they have implemented an Electronic Health Record at all sites and all providers are using it, and health center costs.

Jennifer L. Rankin, PhD
Senior Manager, Research and Product Services
HealthLandscape

For more information or to just begin using the UDS Mapper, please visit www.udsmapper.org and plan on attending one of our free webinars!

Learn more about HealthLandscape with our online Webinars and Training