Health Indicators Warehouse: A tool for using health indicators to make data-driven decisions

Background: The Health Indicators Warehouse (HIW) is a centralized data repository of publicly available health indicators. Its purpose is to help data consumers better understand health outcomes and to use data to inform decision-making at the national, state, and local levels. Users can visualize information on the website, and are able to download datasets for use in their own software applications. Objectives/Purpose: This presentation will focus on the various formats by which indicator data have been presented in the HIW, including basic and comparative tables, charts, graphs, and maps of the aggregate data. Also, the ability to download and report on aggregated indicator data will be presented. Methods: Using selected indicators from data initiatives and/or providers such as Healthy People 2020, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and County Health Rankings, the HIW provides a platform that visualizes various indicator data, including bar charts, line graphs for time trends, and chloropleth maps of geographic distributions. Comparative reports are also available for some indicators, which can be used as a “dashboard” to compare the status of one geographic jurisdiction relative to another. Results: This project demonstrates the utility and application of a publicly available indicator website to report community-level aggregate indicator data in a variety of formats, as well as to download information for the potential creation of customized applications. Discussion/Conclusions: The examples shown from the HIW demonstrate the benefit of bringing together indicator data from multiple sources in order to make data-driven decisions, as well as presenting data in different modes to improve the interpretation of the information contained therein.