Community Health Big Data - Leveraging Partnerships and Data to Improve Community Health

This presentation will detail the exact methods of large scale database implementation in New Orleans, Louisiana using health-based geographic information systems (GIS). These systems function by maintaining intrinsic qualities of geospatial data acquisition, maintenance, analysis, and reporting. With respect to healthcare, GIS can be focused to improve overall experience of care, improve general health of specified populations, and decrease average per capita costs in healthcare. In 2013, the Louisiana Public Health Institute (LPHI) decided to take a new initiative in public health by engineering a community health database which compiles and layers data from different sources spanning the entire city into one central, searchable database. This will expand the utility of the data and open up innovative opportunities in public health surveillance, including monitoring of social health determinants and linking those to health outcomes, as well as research and practice. This database will house a large volume of unique proprietary data by building a strong partnership network with numerous organizations within the city. LPHI developed three use cases for understanding geographic variations in aggregated health outcomes for public health and public policy planning, which include (1) Mapping, (2) Layering, (3) Research and Evaluation. Two additional use cases, (4) Nesting and (5) Tracking, are used to link the database to clinical data in order to analyze environmental effects on individual health outcomes. Over a year long timeline, this project will develop a model to be used by other agencies to successfully implement a community health database in other cities across America.