Chicago Health Atlas Roundtable Explores Creation of Analytics Tool

City Tech’s work crosses constituents, neighborhoods, and entire industries. We’re interested in addressing the challenges that impact cities globally – mobility, health, construction, and more.

Our work through the Chicago Health Atlas offers a community health data resource for residents, community organizations, and public health stakeholders. Using the Atlas, users can explore 77 community areas and over 160 health indicators through data sets and street-level resource maps.

The Chicago Health Atlas has proved a valuable tool for community organizations and health and wellness providers; data maps, charts, and tables from the Atlas can support grant applications, community meetings, and academic research, and the open application programming interface (API) allows users to access data for their own applications.

City Tech has been exploring the potential of adding an analytics tool to the Chicago Health Atlas in addition to its existing resources. The additional tool can maximize the health and wellness outcomes of our community organizations and take the labor out of data analysis.

On February 19, 2020, City Tech hosted a roundtable discussion with thought leaders and Chicago Health Atlas end users. Those who joined “Chicago Health Atlas Roundtable: Maximizing Health and Wellness Outcomes through a Community Analytics Tool” helped us evaluate the usefulness of an automated analytics tool to support organizations as they seek to serve their constituents, create philanthropic opportunities, and use data to better understand population health.

The roundtable attendees were able to: (1) identify gaps in data sets contained in the Health Atlas; (2) provide a clearer understanding of current Health Atlas audiences and contemplate future audiences; (3) highlight some of the challenges and complexities of building an equitable analytics tool; and (4) provide actionable ideas around defining goals of an impactful analytics tool.

We explored potential users who could better address issues through improved data availability and insights, including:

• Community residents
• Care providers
• Community organizers
• Data scientists
• Grant writers
• NGO’s/Nonprofits
• Academic Institutions
• Health and Human Services providers

With the additional analytics tool, these users could extend their capacity and insights to:

• Democratize the data
• Dynamic data to inform the work organizations are doing
• Utilize an intuitive and user-friendly tool
• Empower individuals and communities
• Use data to tell their communities’ stories
• Identify and implement policy interventions

Organizations who attended the roundtable currently use a variety of data sources to make programmatic decisions, including but not limited to:

• Census Tract
• Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH)
• Chicago Health Atlas
• City Health Dashboard : National dashboard with 37 measures of health, the factors that shape health, and drivers of health equity to guide local solutions for U.S. cities.
• City Data Portal : The City of Chicago's open data portal lets you find city data, facts about your neighborhood, create maps and graphs about the city, and freely download the data for your own analysis. Many of these datasets are updated at least once a day, and many of them are updated several times a day
• Chicago Public Schools (CPS)
• Homeless Information Management System (HIMS) : A Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) is a local information technology system used to collect client-level data and data on the provision of housing and services to homeless individuals and families and persons at risk of homelessness.
• Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE)
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) : SNAP provides nutrition benefits to supplement the food budget of needy families so they can purchase healthy food and move towards self-sufficiency.
• Uniform Data System (UDS) : Assists health centers in collecting and standardizing data
• Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) : Monitors six categories of health-related behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of death and disability among youth and adults.

Despite a variety of resources, organizations face challenges in working with data. These community providers need more diverse data, consistency in data across topics and geographic levels, and more reliable data that is accurately represented in conclusions. Addressing these concerns can help communities make real-time decisions based on updated data and allocate resources more effectively.

Following our roundtable discussion, we believe we came away with a deeper understanding of the health and wellness data, information, resources, and gaps that exist in the current landscape. The input was both thoughtful and insightful and will help guide City Tech as we look to further our investigation in building an automated data analytics tool utilizing health and wellness data to ultimately produce increased health and wellness outcomes for all residents of the City of Chicago.

Join the Collaboration
In the coming weeks we look forward to continuing the conversation regarding possible partnerships and potential data referrals. If you are interested in adding your data to the Atlas or would like to engage as we explore the next evolution of the Atlas, contact us at Collaborate@CityTech.org.

About City Tech Collaborative (City Tech): City Tech is an urban solutions accelerator that tackles problems too big for any single sector or organization to solve alone. City Tech’s work uses IoT sensing networks, advanced analytics, and urban design to create scalable, market ready solutions. Current initiatives address advanced mobility, healthy cities, connected construction, and emerging growth opportunities. City Tech was born and raised in Chicago, and every city is a potential partner. Visit www.CityTech.org and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About the Chicago Health Atlas: The Chicago Health Atlas is a community health data resource that residents, community organizations, and public health stakeholders can easily search, analyze, and download neighborhood-level health data for the City of Chicago. A City Tech solution, the Chicago Health Atlas was initially developed in 2012 by the Smart Chicago Collaborative and the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) with funding from the Otho S.A. Sprague Memorial Institute. Explore the Chicago Health Atlas by visiting www.ChicagoHealthAtlas.org.