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

7 Ways Data Sharing Can Make Your Organization Stronger

Sharing data with your community
can provide tangible benefits for your organization.
Photo ©iStockphoto.com/Peter Booth and Alexandra Booth

We hear a lot about data these days: big data, open data, proprietary data, market data, metadata.

But we don't hear a lot about data sharing. At least not in business or nonprofit circles.

Data sharing is fairly common among university and research institutions who see their data as a public asset. Federal, state, and local governments have begun to step up and release useful data sets. But beyond institutional walls, there is still widespread reticence against letting anyone outside the organization have access to "our" data.

So why would you, as a private company or nonprofit, want to share your data?

1. It makes your data more valuable. 

Your data is just that: your data. By adding your data to others', a fuller picture emerges of what is really happening in your market, industry, or community. This is true whether you formally "pool" your data into a data portal, or simply compare your data against other data sets.

2. It promotes collaboration.

Data sharing helps you choose partners wisely. You're a business owner, and until you sought out that specific data set, you did not realize that Company X had the potential to be an excellent strategic partner. You're a nonprofit executive director just beginning to realize the power of collective impact. By opening up your data, you can more easily answer the question, "Who else is working in this field?"

3. It promotes innovation.

Building 20 at MIT became well-known as an incubator for innovation. Educators and researchers from disparate fields occupied the space, and in the natural course of their workday, they bumped into each other. Through conversations and generally taking an interest in one another, new ideas sprang forth, ideas which may not have come about otherwise.

The same can occur when you share your data. You may inadvertently generate a new app, a new insight, or a new way of looking at the world because you generously made your data available to all.

4. It demonstrates your organization's transparency. 

Every organization has a level of accountability. Businesses must be accountable to their shareholders and consumers; nonprofits must be accountable to their donors and constituents. All must be accountable to their community.

By willingly sharing your data with the community at large, you demonstrate that you are willing to be accountable for your organization's strengths, you are willing to accept responsibility for areas that need improvement, and you are open to being vulnerable to both praise and criticism. All of these actions help to build trust.

5. It enlarges your worldview. 

When you're the only one looking at your data, you can only see things from your point of view. By exposing your data to the rest of the world, you invite comment--and insight. Viewers outside your organization bring their own experience to your data, and may be able to give you a new perspective that might never have been realized had the data been kept internal.

6. It's a two-way street.

Data sharing begets data sharing.Your courage in stepping out will invite others to do the same.

7. It makes things happen.

Data sharing doesn't have to be passive. Host a hackathon to build that elusive app you've been putting off for months. Sponsor a data visualization contest around your data. Tell the data viz team the concept you're trying to express, and let them have a go at it. Design an event that matches creativity to a legitimate need and see what emerges. If nothing else, you've built goodwill and had fun in the process.

We're not suggesting that you release all of your data. Or confidential data. Just data that could benefit the community as a whole. And of course you must employ some safeguards. In a future post, we'll give you some guidelines on how to cleanse and de-identify your data, so that you can share your data with confidence.

Have a specific question about making your data accessible? Contact us at info@healthlandscape.org.

Or visit www.HealthLandscape.org to sign up for a Community Data Portal webinar. (Next one is tomorrow, August 22 at 3:00 pm ET. Click here to register.)

GIS Tracks Emerging Statewide Patient Care Patterns

We are pleased to be featured in Esri's Spring 2013 Health & Human Services newsletter. The article highlights the North Carolina Health Information Portal (NC-HIP), which our client Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC) is using to help manage its Medicare and Medicaid populations.

CCNC comprises 14 network partners who collectively manage 1.2 million of North Carolina's 1.6 million Medicaid recipients. The portal combines clinical and claims data with public data, so CCNC can better understand what is happening with their patient population at the community level.

The article appears on pages 8 and 9 of the newsletter. Click here to download the full issue.

The North Carolina Health Information Portal helps North Carolina improve quality of care for its Medicare and Medicaid populations. This article appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Esri's Health & Human Services newsletter.

Using Pinterest and HealthLandscape as a Way to Share Your Community Data

Have a Pinterest account? HealthLandscape does too. We just set ours up a week or so ago, so we can begin to showcase some of our tools and current projects. (Look for it to build out over time.)

Pinterest has taken hold because it harnesses the power of visual communication. Any image can be pinned—a photo, ad, infographic, data visualization, or video—and it will grab your viewer's attention quicker than words alone would.

So have you thought about using Pinterest as a way to share your mapped data? Your map + Pinterest could equal more traffic to your web site and more of your data getting out into the community!

Simply follow these steps:

• Develop your map in HealthLandscape using our QuickGeocodes, QuickThemes, or Community HealthView tool.
• Save the file.
• Upload the finished file to your organization's Pinterest site. 
• Be sure to add a description of the map and some creative copy that links to your organization's web site.
• Anticipate referral traffic!

We created a QuickMap of population change data in the Detroit area and posted it on our Pinterest site as an example. Follow us there and see how Pinterest + HealthLandscape can work for you!