Data inclusion for a web-based system for community health assessment: The NH example

Web-based solutions for data dissemination have become important tools for public health practice. NH's web reporting and querying system, known as HealthWRQS, currently includes birth, death, hospital discharge, and cancer registry data. For each of these datasets, key indicators were chosen for inclusion in HealthWRQS. The key indicators represent some of the most commonly requested analyses of administrative data for community health assessment. To support analysis for different definitions of “community,” HealthWRQS allows for analysis at multiple different geographic aggregations (such as county and hospital service area); users can also aggregate their own combination of towns. Augmenting the system with behavioral risk factor, medical claims, and performance measurement data is a major part of the future development of HealthWRQS. During this session, the presenters will discuss the different data included in the system and how each provides important information for community health assessment. This will include a review of the decision-making about and design of a web-based query system with geographic flexibility. In addition, the presentation will provide an overview of how New Hampshire has created additional web-based tools to support the development of WRQS.