Community HealthView Updates

What is Community HealthView?

HealthLandscape’s Community HealthView tool enables users to search a database to find publicly-available datasets and map them by state or county. Users can customize the way their data are displayed with different options for color scheme, palette, number of categories, and distribution. Current major datasets include Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) rates and measures; American Community Survey (ACS); Area Resource File (ARF); Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS); CDC Wonder; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) rates, costs, and utilization; Dartmouth Atlas; Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE); National Cancer Institute State Cancer Profiles; Robert Wood Johnson Ranked Measures; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Environment Atlas.

American Community Survey (2010-2014)

The ACS is an annual survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau to capture current information on Americans and the workforce. The most recent five-year estimates (2010-2014) are now available in Community HealthView. These datasets include demographic,  socioeconomic, and housing information, such as age, race, education, family type, employment, income, language, age of housing structures, and housing without plumbing, among many others.

CMS Multiple Chronic Conditions (2014)

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services releases yearly updates to their multiple chronic conditions data. HealthLandscape updated the latest 2014 CMS data release in 2016 to Community HealthView. These data include disease prevalence and Medicare utilization and spending for multiple chronic conditions. Each of these data sets includes statistics for all Medicare beneficiaries, those less than 65, and those 65 and over.

CMS Chronic Conditions (2014)

Another set of data that CMS releases annually is the chronic conditions dataset. These data show the percentage of various conditions by Medicare beneficiary age group (total, less than 65 years, 65 and over). The data describe the percent of these Medicare beneficiaries by county with conditions such as arthritis, cancer, depression, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, hypertension, stroke, among others. These data were updated in 2016 for data year 2014.

CMS Geographic Variation (2014)

The third CMS related dataset that HealthLandscape has recently updated in Community HealthView is the 2014 Geographic Variation data. These data provide a spatial background on the distribution of various healthcare services that CMS recipients receive across the United States. Each indicator is represented as a cost and percent utilization. Some of these data include imaging, hospice care, outpatient dialysis, tests, emergency department visits, durable medical equipment, and Medicare Part B costs and utilization.

Health Indicators Warehouse (2011-2013; 2009-2013)

The Health Indicators Warehouse (HIW) releases data by single- or multiple-year on an annual basis. HealthLandscape has updated Community HealthView with the 2013 HIW prevalence data for several datasets for aggregate data years, 2011-2013, and where applicable, 2009-2013 aggregates. HIW data have been updated for several indicators including cancer and heart disease deaths, years of potential life lost, and infant mortality.

Looking forward

In the coming months, HealthLandscape will be updating Community HealthView with many more datasets that haven’t been updated in several years. Some of these will include data on 2014 Supplemental Security Income Recipients, the 2010 USDA Food Deserts, 2010-2012 HIV Prevalence from HIW, 2010-2011 Internal Revenue Service Migration Data, 2015 Census Population Estimates, and the 2016 Robert Wood Johnson Ranked and Additional Measures data.

For live updates on what will be updated next, follow us on Twitter!

David Grolling

GIS Specialist

HealthLandscape

Family Physicians Debate Social Determinants of Health

HealthLandscape has long recognized the value of Social Determinants of Health - the idea that socioeconomic and demographic characteristics play significant roles in influencing health outcomes. This idea has been gaining traction over the past few years, with organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releasing new guidelines on Health Outcomes and Determinants.

In their March/April 2016 issue, the Annals of Family Medicine ran three pieces discussing the integration of social determinants of health into primary care practice.

Alongside our colleagues at OHSU and OCHIN, Dr. Andrew Bazemore and Jené Grandmont represented the HealthLandscape team in the authorship of the main editorial article, "Perspectives in Primary Care: A Conceptual Framework and Path for Integrating Social Determinants of Health Into Primary Care Practice." This editorial discusses the importance of incorporating social determinants of health into the process of care. The article addresses the idea of standardizing the SDoH to be collected at the point of care, in line with the 11 domains recommended by the National Academy of Medicine in their 2014 report "Capturing Social and Behavioral Domains and Measures in Electronic Health Records." Further, the piece begins to explore an integration framework, considering how SDoH might best be used for practice and research.

The follow-up point/counterpoint section features two physicians debating the benefits of placing social determinants of health onto a primary care physician's already overloaded plate. While both writers recognize the value of incorporating patient and community data, opinions differ on what the physician's role in that process should be and how effectively a physician can use that information to help their patients.

It will be interesting to see where these conversations take us in the world of health care delivery, and we're excited to be a part of it.

Want more information about social determinants of health? Visit our Population Health Mapper to explore community characteristics and health outcomes in your area or check out the HealthLandscape Community Vitals API, a powerful tool that allows researchers and others to append extracts of the HealthLandscape community data pool to their de-identified clinical records in order to study the impact of social and behavioral factors on health outcomes.

Register for our online Webinars to learn more about HealthLandscape

 

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

Report From Esri User Conference 2015

The Esri International User Conference takes place each summer in San Diego, California. The HealthLandscape application is built on the esri ArcGIS platform, so we regularly attend the conference to discuss our work and to stay current in esri technology and trends. It’s a great opportunity to mingle with other data geeks, learn some new tips and tricks, and see what kinds of new and exciting projects our peers are working on. As always, the agenda was packed full of interesting sessions, educational opportunities, and user group meetings.

This year, I had the opportunity to present two moderated session papers on behalf of the team. Both presentations discussed the importance of looking at patients in the context of their home communities, but from two very different perspectives; public health research and individual practitioners.

Accelerating Data Value Across a National CHC Network introduced the new HealthLandscape Geocode API, which allows organizations to append community and social determinants data to patient-level data: giving them a unique way to enrich their investigations of patient-centered outcomes. Appending these types of data will allow for the exploration of clinical and disease-oriented service areas, hotspots, and coldspots. The Community Context of Health Center Patients focused on how we can use population-based big data and geospatial technologies to understand the social and environmental influences on the health of a physician’s patient panel through the idea of Community Vital Signs - as patient vital signs provide a biometric snapshot of an individual’s health status, community vital signs provide an environmental health perspective. Taken together, we can improve the care that patients are receiving. Both of these projects will be featured as detailed blog posts in the coming weeks.

In addition to our paper presentations, HealthLandscape was once again recognized as one of the top three GIS applications in the User Conference Applications Fair. The HealthLandscape Population Health Mapper builds upon the idea of “Place Matters,” a concept discussed in a recent blog. Users can select county-level metrics from seven categories identified by the CDC as recommended Health Outcomes and Health Determinants, using a slider bar to set thresholds and easily identify counties that perform poorly compared to the national average. We've highlighted this tool on the blog and will be hosting a “Population Health Mapper” webinar on Wednesday, August 19th. Click here to register, or contact us by email for more information.

I always enjoy the time that I spend at the Esri User Conference and I never fail to return home with new collaboration opportunities, new skills, and new ideas. I’m thrilled to take home another HealthLandscape award this year, too.

Jené Grandmont
Senior Manager, Application Development and Data Services
HealthLandscape