StatisticsWe collect all kinds of surveillance about prevalence of disease, birth, causes of death, reasons for hospital visits, smoking rates and hundreds of other indicators to help us assess health indicators and design interventions to improve outcomes.

For the first time ever, we now have a tool to explore this data and visualize it in several different ways.  Our new Community Profiles Dashboard is a huge leap forward for public health professionals, city planners, non-profit organizations, medical providers and anyone who needs public health data to improve their performance.  What makes the new Community Profiles Dashboard revolutionary is the way you can access, sort, and analyze the information.  The Dashboard provides several options for looking at the state, county, or small community level data among the more than 100 Primary Care Areas in Arizona.

If you’re a community planner and you want to see where there are higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension – you can compare data from the last four years to see how different areas have changed.  As a community planner, this information can be very useful in how you plan for the future.  Knowing this information could help you make a more informed decision about where the new community park will be built, or where to locate a new bike and walking path. To improve the overall health of our communities, access to these kinds of services is vital.

If you run a non-profit, you can zero in on key indicators related to your mission and drill down to the community level to determine where to focus your resources.

The site is user friendly and will work on a desktop or mobile device, like an iPad.  If you want to take a quick tour of the Community Profiles Dashboard and learn about a few of the functions, take a look at our video tutorial.  The video gives an overview of how to access the dashboard and a few of the functions.  It’s the first in a series of four videos that will highlight data and different functions of the dashboard.

In the upcoming weeks I’ll be blogging about some of the other unique and interesting data that you can gather from the site.  Thanks go out to Dr’s Khaleel Hussaini and Nicholas Bishop, Patricia Tarango, Tracy Lenartz, Jeff Burgess, the staff from GeoWise Ltd., and especially Wes Kortuem and Marvis Kisakye – their leadership and help developing the site.   More to come over the next few weeks.