Neighborhood data for health: Using “healthography” to develop place-based public health indicators

Based on a growing understanding that how and where people live affects their health and well-being, local public health agencies are increasingly designing place-based interventions which require data for small geographic areas. As a result, many city and county agencies have begun to develop ways to provide access to neighborhood-level data. This is especially challenging in many cities in California where historically, established neighborhood identities and boundaries often do not exist. We describe a unique collaboration between public health, information services, and planning departments in Santa Clara County, California, to define neighborhood boundaries as a first step in producing neighborhood profiles. The partnership organized all census tracts in the county into more than 100 neighborhoods in 15 cities. We will describe criteria that guided boundary definition and lessons learned from engaging city planners and others in approving boundaries.

Due to a large number of indicators and datasets, data management issues have impacted neighborhood profile projects in other jurisdictions, particularly the capacity to update data regularly. We will describe how we worked with stakeholders to select a limited number of the most meaningful socio-demographic, environmental, and health indicators and detail how lessons learned from other neighborhood profiles influenced the design of this project. This included (a) selecting multiple online formats to provide data by neighborhood and to enable comparison of indicators across neighborhoods; (b) automating analysis to streamline data management, updating, and quality assurance; (c) developing an online, searchable map for locating neighborhood profiles by address; and (d) developing dissemination strategies to support independent use. We will also describe how the profiles have been used by stakeholders to investigate health inequities at the neighborhood level and to select neighborhoods for intervention.