Community Profiles and Priorities MICA: Using evidence to understand community needs


Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

3268.0: Monday, December 12, 2005 - 2:30 PM

Abstract #112474

Beth Baker, PhD, MPH¹, Garland Land, MPH², Laura K. Brennan Ramirez, PhD, MPH³, and Julie M. Bender, MPH, CHES³. (1) School of Public Health, Saint Louis University, 3545 Lafayette Avenue, Suite 300, St. Louis, MO 63104, (2) Center for Health Information Management and Evaluation, Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, P.O. Box 570, Jefferson City, MO 65102-0570, (3) Transtria, LLC, 3525 Watson Road, Suite R, St. Louis, MO 63139, 314-781-1562, laura@transtria.com

Public health researchers have developed impressive surveillance systems to track rates of morbidity, mortality and their associated risk factors. In many cases, however, this information is not readily accessible or tailored to meet local planning needs. The Missouri Information for Community Assessment (MICA) system provides a series of interactive tools (e.g., Community Profiles, Priorities MICA) for local planning, including needs assessment and priority setting. The needs assessment tools allow users to summarize data, calculate rates, and prepare information in a graphic format for presentation. These data include health conditions, such as causes of death, births, hospitalizations and emergency room use. Users are able to choose from among many conditions and generate county and state data tables by year of occurrence, age, gender, and race. Priorities MICA is an interactive system that allows the user to prioritize health conditions or risk factors. The user can identify how disease-specific morbidity and mortality trends differ by various subpopulations in Missouri (e.g., age, gender and ethnicity). The user then selects criteria desired (e.g., hospitalizations, amenability to change, community support and racial disparity) and the system weights the criteria for prioritization among the selected health condition categories. The system then ranks diseases or risk factors based on the prioritization criteria, county selected and the data for that county (or for the state of Missouri). These needs assessment and priority-setting tools will be described and illustrated using the existing systems.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to

• Describe the purpose of the different needs assessment tools (e.g., Community Profiles, Priorities MICA).
• Identify how the Priorities MICA system uses different criteria to set priorities given a range of health topics and risk factors.
• Discuss how these MICA needs assessment tools can be used at the state and local levels to support evidence-based decision-making.

Keywords: Needs Assessment, Community Health Planning

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Using Technology to Promote Evidence-based Needs Assessment, Priority Setting and Intervention Planning at the State and Local Levels

The 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition (December 10-14, 2005) of APHA