GIS and Community Assessment: A Collaborative Paradigm for Public Health Surveillance

Background: The New Mexico Community Data Collaborative (NMCDC), and its data warehouse with interactive mapping website, grew out of the search for efficient methods and tools to serve the community assessment needs of NM’s Community Health Councils and Health Promotion advocates. In 2006, it became an integral part of the Place Matters movement and its local affiliate in Bernalillo County, then expanded its focus towards providing data to assess geographic, income, and racial/ethnic disparities.  In recent years it has expanded to be better able to serve all New Mexico communities with an emphasis on local health impact assessments, and broad issue areas such as early childhood health and education, food security, obesity, public services and the built environment. 

Objective and Purpose: NMCDC aims to place data in the hands of broad coalitions of program planners and decision makers and thus empower them to benefit local communities.  Accessible information informs evidence-based decision making to plan and improve health and education service delivery, evaluate interventions and systems, and inform policy decisions.

Methods: NMCDC Develops and Shares Neighborhood Data with Local Organizations that Promote Community Assessment, Child Health and Participatory Decision Making.  NMCDC maps contain aggregated data organized by sub-county areas such as census tract, zip code, school districts and other administrative boundaries.  The interactive functions of ArcGIS Online facilitate group exploration of health and education issues.

Results: NMCDC currently maintains over 150 aggregated datasets containing over 1000 mappable and visually explorable indicators on health determinants and outcomes.  46 analysts collaborate to share and develop tools, and nearly 200 public health activists received training in the first 4 months of 2014.

Discussion/Conclusion: Cloud based sharing of work products, analytic tools and datasets can have positive impacts on the spread of evidence based public health practice.  It also can provide great savings in resources, increased competiveness of grant proposals and contribute to the incorporation of health in all policies.