Empowering Policymakers: Examining User-Friendly Data Analytic Tools

In recent years, large health data sets have become available for analysis. This is critically important to public health initiatives since policymakers can use this data to drive discussions around prevention and wellness for all populations at all ages. Unfortunately, although there is more data than ever before, it is still difficult for policymakers to ask the important questions of the data; as funds for underserved populations is cut, the data is both more important to understand and harder to obtain. Fiscal restraints have meant that many organizations have lost dedicated staff that analyze these large data sets for policymakers. While critical to protecting personal health information, HIPAA and FISMA have added additional barriers to accessing the data. Standard database approaches to these problems often require complex programming in order to extract necessary results. This session will examine a database analysis model—iMMRS—that is designed to allow policy analysts to delve into the data sets themselves, thus avoiding the need for programming staff or complex ad-hoc reporting systems. The model will be judged on its ability to meet the needs of users who are less technically oriented than traditional database users. These users want to be able to find answers to their questions quickly and without having to understand all the components of the dataset. Therefore, interfaces must be intuitive, directed at the conceptual elements of a question, and compliant with federal privacy and accessibility rules. The system must provide both intuitive data visualization tools and interfaces for the definition of complex analytic representations. The interface must support large-scale data extracts based on complex study group definitions and the production of study-ready analytic records and simple summary data forms. The interface must also be flexible enough to accommodate many different data types and be customizable based on user needs.