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

How One Person Used Mapping to Improve Community Health

The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati (one of HealthLandscape's sponsoring organizations) and The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky recently co-sponsored an event called "The Hot Spotter's Agenda: Targeting Resources to Achieve Quality Care." Keynote speaker was Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a primary care physician in Camden, New Jersey.

Dr. Brenner's dramatic story is told in a 2011 New Yorker article by Atul Gawande. Dr. Brenner, who was on track to become a neuroscientist, instead changed his vocational focus after volunteering one day a week in a free primary care clinic during medical school. After seeing how patients were treated--or not, in one case--he became curious about the relationship between crime "hot spots" and health care delivery. He used maps to plot the data. Although he did not persuade city leaders to implement solutions based on his findings, he continued to collect and examine data and look for medical usage patterns using maps.

He made many discoveries. For example, he located the two blocks that accounted for more healthcare costs than any other in the city--totaling more than $200 million in healthcare bills in a 5.5-year period. He found that a single building sent more people to hospitals as a result of serious falls than any other, totaling almost $3 million in healthcare costs.

Dr. Brenner made meaningful use of the data. He has subsequently poured his efforts into the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, an organization he founded to treat "superutilizers." His team has successfully built relationships with the patients they serve, and the Coalition's care has resulted in significant reductions in healthcare costs.

Click here to view Dr. Brenner's keynote entitled, "Bending the Cost Curve and Improving Quality in One of America's Poorest Cities." Also presenting are Greg Moody and Eric Friedlander, who give Ohio and Kentucky regional perspectives to the concept of "hot spotting."