Automated data spreadsheets for California's Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health programs

The Family Health Outcomes Project (FHOP), a project within the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, San Francisco provides ongoing training and technical assistance to the 61 local health jurisdictions (LHJs) in California through a cooperative agreement with the state Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health (MCAH) Branch. In 2005, as part of an effort to engage and assist LHJs with data issues and interpretation, FHOP devised a series of EXCEL spreadsheets. The spreadsheets are designed to provide local MCAH Directors and their staff with timely local and state data and to automatically generate tables with statistical comparisons, and to calculate trends and trend comparisons for state and local health indicators. The spreadsheets provide data on the following indicators: birth intervals, birth weight/gestational age, infant/youth mortality, birth/fertility, fetal mortality, prenatal care, and hospital discharges for asthma, mental health conditions and injuries. Each spreadsheet covers 12 years of local and state data, and supplies race/ethnic breakdown and age-specific data (as available). Four EXCEL pages are created for each indicator. The first contains a table with numerators and appropriate denominators. The second identifies key data quality issues that may impact reliability of estimated rates. The third provides indicator definitions, risk factors, data sources, and tables showing LHJ rates with confidence intervals and state rates. The fourth provides a trend graph with a table showing the results of a regression to determine trend significance. This presentation will discuss the utility of the spreadsheets and demonstrate their functionality.