Development of Community Profiles in Missouri

While there is a vast amount of data on a community’s health, environment, and social/demographic; data is scattered in a multitude of places and few datasets are comparable across jurisdictions.  To address this problem the Missouri Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) team created profiles for specific geographic areas across the state.  The team generated profiles at two geographic levels: county and city. 

The Missouri EPHT team gathered data from diverse locations, from state and federal resources to private not-for-profit organizations.  Utilizing the consistency of EPHT datasets for health and environment data, and standardized data sets for community level information, EPHT created profiles that are consistent from a local to a national level.  While the county and city profiles follow the same template, they provide slightly different data due to challenges encountered during creation.

The Missouri EPHT county profiles include health data from the EPHT nationally consistent data and measures (NCDMs), environmental data, and social determinants of health data. 

City level profiles provided more of a challenge.  City boundaries change over time, and it isn’t always clear where city boundaries are located.  The EPHT team talked with city level Local Public Health Agencies (LPHAs) and determined that using zip code boundaries would be best.  Gathered data was aggregated to the city level.  Most health and social determinants data were available at the zip code level. 

Community profiles are extremely useful.  They allow end users such as LPHAs to gather a diverse amount of information on their community from one place.  Thanks to data handling consistency, profile information can be compared with other jurisdictions.  The social determinants section can be used to find correlations with health and/or environmental outcomes.