How the University of Veracruz used data visualisation to help develop the state’s Observatory on Food Security and Nutrition

Background

The University of Veracruz was established in 1944 and is considered the state’s premier institution of higher education. The university now has a presence in five university regions and 28 municipalities. The university works with many national and state-level organisations that are seeking to improve the lives of people living in Veracruz.

The Faculty of Nutrition, Xalapa, which belongs to the Universidad Veracruzana, works in partnership with other agencies and hosts the Centre for Food Security and Nutrition State of Veracruz (OBSAN). The Observatory’s mission is is to provide a platform that provides information on food security and nutrition in the State of Veracruz and to contributes to decision-making and policy development.

Read the full article

How the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has used data reporting and visualization to develop its Disability and Health Data System (DHDS)

Background

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a government agency that was set up to protect health and promote quality of life through the prevention and control of disease, injury, and disability. Part of its work is to harvest expertise and information that will allow it to create tools that people and communities need to protect their health.

The CDC’s Disability and Health Program promotes health and wellness amongst people with disabilities. Presenting state level data on the health and health outcomes of people with disabilities is an important part of the program and has led to the development of Disability and Health Data System (DHDS). This is a state level disability surveillance tool designed to assist partners, researchers and the general public in the assessment of the health and wellness of people with disabilities.

Read the full article >>

Using online maps to address unwarranted variation in health

Writing in the Health Service Journal this week (subscription needed) paediatric registrar Dr Ronny Cheung highlights the NHS Atlas of Variation in Healthcare and in particular the Child Health Atlas as a useful tool in helping NHS commissioners reduce unwarranted variation in healthcare.

Unwarranted variation is a term associated with the work of professor Jack Wennberg who spent four decades documenting the geographic variation in the healthcare that patients receive in the United States. His assertion is that the variation occurs because healthcare is complex and there are many influencing factors. These include socioeconomic factors, differences in population age or gender and also innovation in healthcare delivery – which may lead to improvements in the quality of healthcare services delivered in one area.

Wennberg also believes that some variation is unwarranted. In other words, it should not be happening and can occur because healthcare professionals are not practising according to evidence-based clinical standards, or there is variation in clinical performance. It has also been shown that where there are high levels of healthcare provision, there are higher admission rates and more outpatient appointments.

The Child Health Atlas was devised as a way of illustrating the variation in healthcare children receive across 27 indicators of child health. It was compiled by the Child and Maternal Health Observatory and for the first time provides a visual online demonstration of variations across the breadth of child health services provided in England. You can read how ChiMat worked with InstantAtlas here. The Child Health Atlas allows users to view any of the 27 indicators at upper tier Local Authority or PCT level. The extent of the variation is considerable. For example, perinatal mortality varies twofold among PCTs in England and breastfeeding rates threefold

The intention is that clinicians, commissioners and service users will be able to identify priority areas for improving outcome, quality and productivity. The question is, now that we have the tools to reduce unwarranted variation in the shape of the Child Health Atlas, whether we will see a coordinated effort. Commissioners, local authorities (now responsible for public health) and provider organisations will have to work together to reduce variation. However, there are some who believe this in increasingly unlikely and that health and social care delivery is likely to be fragmented as a result of the Health and Social Care Act. As with so many things in healthcare delivery, it is going to be a case of having to wait and see.

Helping local governments in Victoria identify priority areas for health intervention using online data visualisation

Background

The Department of Health’s core objective is to achieve the best health and wellbeing for everyone living in Victoria and its role covers planning, policy development, funding and regulation of health service providers. 

The Health Intelligence Unit (HIU) provides high quality information on the health, and determinants of health of the Victorian population to improve health policy development and service planning. Decisions that affect health include the public making healthy choices, professionals exercising judgment, managers improving processes and politicians allocating resources. The Department of Health believes better information leads to better decisions, which in turn, contribute to better health and well-being for Victorians. The major business process of the HIU comprises the following: health surveillance data sourcing and collection; transformation of data into usable information and the dissemination of health intelligence to support planning and decision making.

Read the full article on the InstantAtlas partner site – ‘Success with Software’ >>

How the World Health Organization is using data visualisation to present information on inequalities in health system performance across the European Union

Background

The World Health Organization (WHO) embarked on a project to improve the availability of and access to evidence on inequalities in health system performance, including quality of care and the structural determinants of these inequalities. The project’s initial focus was on countries in the European Union.

The aim was to take into account the geographical nature of the regional data and not just to reflect national averages. The WHO team was led by Dr Claudia Stein and also included Drs Enrique Loyola, Ivo Rakovac and Anatoliy Nosikov who are based in Denmark. Dr Loyola explains that the intention was to use data  at the regional (NUTS2) level that was already available and avoid requests for further information. “Part of what we were hoping to achieve was to show that there is already a lot of data out there and that it is often not fully analysed.”

Read the full article >>

The National Cancer Intelligence Network – Presenting cancer information in an easy to understand format for all to access

Background

The National Cancer Intelligence Network (NCIN) is a UK-wide initiative, working to drive improvements in standards of care and clinical outcomes by improving data and information collected about cancer patients, producing analyses and enabling and promoting research.

We spoke to Trish Watts at the NCIN who, along with colleague Steve Davies, has been involved in a project to present data relating to cancer in a format that can be easily accessed and understood. The NCIN works with the UK Association of Cancer Registries (UKACR), the organisation of the 11 Cancer Registries which routinely collect data on cancer in the UK, as well as with the NHS and cancer charities.

A vast quantity of information is produced by the NCIN and its partners. Statistics are published on how many people are diagnosed with, or die from cancer and reports are produced on how it affects different groups of people within the UK. For example, how it affects teenagers and young adults, or different ethnic groups.

Read the full article >>

Child and Maternal Health Observatory, UK

Background

The Child and Maternal Health Observatory (ChiMat) is a national Public Health Observatory established to provide wide-ranging, authoritative data, evidence and practice related to children’s, young people’s and maternal health.

This specialist observatory is part of the Yorkshire and Humber Public Health Observatory (YHPHO)

David Wells, Deputy Director and Local Network Lead, ChiMat says that the basic concept behind the observatory was to make intelligence more readily available to commissioners for child and maternal health services.

Read the full article

 

 

Video Transcript

Welcome to this week’s video tutorial.

Today I would like to show you, how you can activate tooltips and labels for your contextual layers.

In this example report that you can see on the screen, I have two contextual layers included, one for Towns and one for Local Authorities.

I would like to have a tooltip for the towns where I can see the town name when I hover with my mouse pointer over one of these points in the map.

To do this, I need to open the config.xml file of this report in the InstantAtlas Designer.  I click on the map to open the map properties. I drag this divider a bit to the left to see all property names fully.

Towards to bottom of the list I find the property ‘List of Layers Displaying Tips’. This property requires me o type in the ID of the contextual layer for which I would like to enable the tooltip.

The ID of the layers can be found in another file called map.swf.xml. If you open this fine in a text editor I can see an entry for my base layers, my contextual layers and my background mapping layer. Each of the layers has an ID which I can simply copy out of this file. The ID for the Town layer is ‘contextualLayer2’.

I paste this ID into the configuration property and click ‘OK’. If I now save my changes and refresh the report in my browser, I can see the tooltips appear when I hover over the town points.

Activating static labels for my map layers is as easy as enabling tooltips. I go back into the Designer and enter the ID of the layer or layers into the property ‘List of Layers Displaying Labels’. This time I will activate labels for both contextual layers. So I add two rows and enter the IDs of both layers. They are ‘contextualLayer1’ and ‘contextualLayer2’. I save my changes again and refresh the browser.

The labels appear, however it looks a bit messy in the map. To work around this I can define zoom ranges in which the labels of each layer appear using the property ‘List Of Display ranges for labelled Layers’. This property requires ranges of percentage values of the starting map width. So for example I would like my Local Authorities to only show labels between the zoom to full extent and zoomed to 50% of the original map width. Then I would like the labels of my Town layers to appear.

So the values I need to put into this property are ‘100-50’ and ’50-0’.

I click ‘OK’, save my changes again and refresh the report. Initially I see only the labels of the Local Authorities. When I zoom in, however, these labels disappear and the Towns names show instead.

The content of the tooltips and labels is the value of the Feature Name Field that I chose when I added the layer into the InstantAtlas Publisher. However, this is only the case if the report was published with version 6.5 or later. Prior to 6.5 the tooltip and labels picked up the Feature Code Field of the contextual layer. So if you do not see the desired values in the tooltips or labels, you should make sure that firstly the values you wish to see are included in an attribute field in the digital map file used to create this contextual layer and secondly that you have chosen this field as the Feature Name Field in the InstantAtlas Publisher when adding the layer.

I hope this little video gives you an idea how tooltips and labelling of contextual layers work with InstantAtlas dynamic report. If you have any questions regarding this, please do not hesitate to contact support@geowise.co.uk.

Have a look at InstantAtlas support blog posts

National Institute for Health and Welfare Finland

Background

The National Institute for Health and Welfare Finland (THL) is a research and development institute under the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. THL serves broader society, the scientific community and decision-makers in central government and municipalities. Its aim is to promote health and welfare inFinland. Within THL there is a Department of Health, Functional Capacity and Welfare. Its work focuses on the most important public health issues, their determinants and monitoring the health of the population and population subgroups.

The department conducts research and development work with a broad collaborative of partners to promote the health and functional capacity of Finnish people and to enhance health monitoring among population subgroups also at local area level.

Read the full article   | Lue suomeksi

Florida Department of Health – ‘Improving access to vast amounts of data in a visually-compelling format’

Sorry – This case study is currently being updated

See our other Public Health Stories

‘How Liverpool PCT is using data presentation to improve access to its Joint Strategic Needs Assessment’

Background

Liverpool primary care trust is leading 2020 Decade of Health and Wellbeing for the Liverpool City region. The PCT’s vision is to achieve transformational improvements in health and in service provision and significant reductions in health inequalities.

The PCT’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) helps commissioners get a better understanding of current and future the health, care and well-being needs of people in Liverpool, and is produced jointly between the Primary Care Trust and City Council.

Colin Wilson, Intelligence Analyst Liverpool PCT, says the PCT wanted to display the JSNA data in a more engaging way – previously it had presented the data in tables and reports that were made available on the website.

Getting started

The Joint Health Unit (a collaboration between Liverpool PCT and Liverpool City Council) decided to use InstantAtlas to present the JSNA in a visually-compelling format. The unit pulled in data from various sources including: mortality rates; life expectancy; percentage of smokers; cancer related deaths and education data (GCSE passes).

Meeting the need

Colin believes that once the JSNA reports go live they will be very useful for anyone involved in commissioning services, such as GP consortia. “The JSNA report is aimed at anyone who has an interest in service delivery, such as health and social care organisations, the voluntary sector and partner agencies such as the Police.

                                                 Read the full article >>>

- Other PCT stories -