Cool Things Others are Doing with their Health Data Portals

Examples of other leading and/or nearby public health open data portals are below. The purpose of the first one, shown in italics, applies pretty much for the other portals:

• California Health and Human Services Open Data Portal The California Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS) has launched its Open Data Portal initiative in order to increase public access to one of the State’s most valuable assets – non-confidential health and human services data. Its goals are to spark innovation, promote research and economic opportunities, engage public participation in government, increase transparency, and inform decision-making. The portal offers access to standardized data that can be easily retrieved, combined, downloaded, sorted, searched, analyzed, redistributed and re-used by individuals, business, researchers, journalists, developers, and government to process, trend, and innovate. There are currently 363 datasets on diseases, health care (eg Asthma ED visit rates and medicaid enrolment), environment (eg violent crime, air quality), risk behaviors, systems (eg Tobacco retail surveillance) etc.

• HealthData.gov This site is dedicated to making data discoverable and making valuable government data available to the public in the hopes of better health outcomes for all. Contains 3,437 datasets including 221 on health, 42 on hospitals and 27 on Medicare.

• New York City's Open Data Portal, https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/ and a companion site, data2go.nyc/map enable generation of maps on vital statistics (births, deaths, live expectancy, death rates by cause) and social determinants of health. ) Figure at top shows number of new cases of children with lead poisoning by district.

• Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center leadership spent a couple of days in Cleveland a couple of years back sharing best practices. Their site has 316 datasets. A performance dashboard shows users by month, number of downloads per dataset, etc. Other tools include::
• Urban Greenprint
• Property Dashboard
• Performance dashboard
• Visualizing Bikeshare usage
• Interactive Pittsburgh Crime Map
• Smell Pittsburgh (community reported smells vs. monitored air quality)
• Quick Count Tool generates counts and trends for dozens of health statistics such as ED visits, hospitalizations and mental health services.
• EarthTime-tool showing reduction in Black/White racial segregation, plus increase in Asian population between 1990 and 2016 (Figure: Black, White and Asian residents shown in green, blue and red).

• Chicago Health Atlas, created by Chicago Dept of Public Health Office of Epidemiology, was an early pioneer. Has data from Chicago DCFS, Fire, Police & Public Schools; and Illinois Departments of Human Services, Public Health and Transportation. Has a dashboard of Healthy Chicago 2.0 Indicators, plus enables mapping of aggregated, de-identified clinical, demographic, social and community data. Also shows disparities and time trends, e.g. infant mortality rates over time and by race/ethnicity.