Supporting community health assessment with data dissemination

Locating and using data and information are key elements of community health assessments. However, public health practitioners often struggle to find useful health information for their communities in a timely manner. Understanding this need, New Hampshire has been working for several years on the development of a community health web-based solution for data dissemination. NH's web reporting and querying system, known as HealthWRQS, currently contains a suite of health indicator reports commonly used for community health assessment. Health data currently included in HealthWRQS are from birth, death, hospital discharge, and cancer registry data. Future plans to augment the system include adding behavioral risk data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), health care claims data, and program performance measure data. Selected key health indicators from these data sets will be included in a community health profile. The goal of having this standard profile available in a web-based system is to make data more easily available to public health practioners across the state to support community health assessment. One major challenge in developing the web query system in NH is the need for public health practitioners to have data available in user-defined geographic areas, because the public health infrastructure can be defined by any number of geographic regions (often a unique combination of cities and towns). During the session, the presenters will discuss the challenges and successes of building a web-based query system that can be used for community health assessment.