Overview
Public health organizations focus on improving health through prevention, management and treatment of diseases. For this reason, health agencies and researchers collect population health data from the census block level to the county level. Such data is analyzed to compute vital statistics that help public health officials understand the trends related to diseases within a given population. These analysis results also facilitate the decision making process for effective health policies and programs.
RENCI researchers identify easy and low-cost approaches to analyzing publicly available, county-level health related vital statistics. This approach involves the use of Web 2.0 tools and freely available applications to aggregate, parse, format and perform ad-hoc queries, and to visualize North Carolina county-level datasets. The resulting visual interfaces are interactive and offer users the power to check trends in county data over time, compare health concerns in different counties, identify outliers and filter data. These Web 2.0 tools and dynamic features can be directly integrated into existing websites without building a complex database backend or using server-side technologies. The approach is less costly than more complex IT approaches, but still offers substantial capabilities.
Overview
Public health organizations focus on improving health through prevention, management and treatment of diseases. For this reason, health agencies and researchers collect population health data from the census block level to the county level. Such data is analyzed to compute vital statistics that help public health officials understand the trends related to diseases within a given population. These analysis results also facilitate the decision making process for effective health policies and programs.
RENCI researchers identify easy and low-cost approaches to analyzing publicly available, county-level health related vital statistics. This approach involves the use of Web 2.0 tools and freely available applications to aggregate, parse, format and perform ad-hoc queries, and to visualize North Carolina county-level datasets. The resulting visual interfaces are interactive and offer users the power to check trends in county data over time, compare health concerns in different counties, identify outliers and filter data. These Web 2.0 tools and dynamic features can be directly integrated into existing websites without building a complex database backend or using server-side technologies. The approach is less costly than more complex IT approaches, but still offers substantial capabilities.
Funding
State of North Carolina
Links to working prototypes
- Example using motion charts: Interactive gadget
- Example using Exhibit: Adhoc filtering interface for NC data
- Example of KML file using Yahoo Pipes
Other data formats can be obtained from:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=tqc3dHoA3hGM7pGF_w6H4A
Project Team
Charles Schmitt, project leader
Ketan Mane
David Bowman
