Interested in learning more about the new features in HealthLandscape? Sign up for a free webinar session to hear about the tools and datasets available to our users.

Visit our webinar page for a list of dates, and times from now through December. There are currently three webinars being offered, as described below. We will be developing webinars on other special topics, including crime and economic datasets, in the coming months.

Introduction to HealthLandscape Geospatial Analysis Health and community are tightly connected. HealthLandscape gives users the ability to create custom maps and tables of health in their communities - depicting populations at risk, health outcomes, and the distribution of health interventions. During this webinar you will learn to use the HealthLandscape interface, what data are available, and how to add your own data to create custom maps.

Using HealthLandscape with Census Data Learn how to use data from the American Community Survey and other US Census Bureau datasets to create custom maps with HealthLandscape.

Using HealthLandscape with CDC and other Health Data Learn to download CDC data and create maps with HealthLandscape.

The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati and the American Academy of Family Physicians Release Major Upgrade to HealthLandscape.org Data Visualization Tool

CINCINNATI -- The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) announce a major upgrade to HealthLandscape.org, a web-based data visualization tool (www.healthlandscape.org) that allows healthcare payers, providers, policymakers, researchers, and community planners to perform spatial analysis on health-related data.

"We know that personal health is affected by many determinants outside our physical condition. For example, how does our community healthcare infrastructure, our social environment, our economic well-being affect our health?" asks Mark Carrozza, Health Informatics Developer at the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati and chief architect of the HealthLandscape.org tool. "HealthLandscape.org helps healthcare providers, payers, policymakers, and planners visualize the impact of such multiple factors on our health."

In the past, health professionals needed to be highly specialized and extensively trained to make effective use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) mapping tools. The new release of HealthLandscape has addressed many shortcomings of early systems. A few of the new features in this release include:

• Ease of use - easily deployed by health professionals with modest information technology backgrounds
• Pre-loaded datasets that include multiple factors affecting personal health with extensive ability to overlay several conditions on one screen (e.g. correlation of obesity and poverty)
• Simple point-and-click access to health information. The data have already been uploaded
• Quick maps, themes, and geocoding capabilities allow users to create maps almost instantly
• Simple data upload capabilities that take output from electronic medical record systems or other database systems formatted as spreadsheets and pasted directly into HealthLandscape

"With HealthLandscape.org, users can upload their data through a simple spreadsheet, geocode it (turn addresses into mappable geographic coordinates) and then immediately create elegant, meaningful visual maps of that information," Carrozza says. "It's a lot easier to see relationships in graphic form than it is to interpret data through tables or charts."

Data visualizations created from a user's own data are powerful. But HealthLandscape.org also provides superior access to public datasets through its new QuickMaps, QuickThemes, and Community Health View tools. Layering a user's own data with public datasets such as average household size, percentage of the population in poverty, census data, transportation data, health professional shortage areas and other indicators offers insight not readily discernible any other way.

All maps can be stored on the web and made accessible wherever there is a web connection for use in reports, analyses, and presentations. "Adding graphic data to a presentation can quickly help users Show their Need, Tell their Story, and Explore Alternatives," says Ed Carl, Executive Director of HealthLandscape, LLC.

HealthLandscape.org displays data from the national down to the neighborhood level in compliance with HIPAA data security requirements, thus ensuring confidentiality of all patient information.

HealthLandscape is a collaboration between The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati and the American Academy of Family Physicians. Both organizations are nonprofit enterprises that share the vision of improving the health condition of their constituents through better understanding of the underlying information that affects health.

"Our primary goal is to promote understanding and improvement of health and healthcare at all levels. HealthLandscape lets people become more involved in and better educated about the health of our communities," says Pat O'Connor, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati. "Healthcare providers, grantees, and policymakers need powerful data and tools to inform their decisions. HealthLandscape.org can provide just those tools and data."

"HealthLandscape can play a significant role for a much wider array of users to work with, display, share and benefit from community health data," said Andrew Bazemore, Assistant Director of the Robert Graham Center, American Academy of Family Physicians. "Policy makers think spatially. They look at maps and understand health in terms of their constituents in a way that simple tables do not permit. With HealthLandscape, health professionals in their communities will be able to use maps to better understand local issues and have the data needed to make more informed health policy decisions."

This map shows counties where obesity is a concern; darker shading means higher percentage obese.

***** About the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati is an independent foundation dedicated to improving community health through grants, evaluation, and education. The Foundation works in Cincinnati and 20 surrounding counties in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. For more information please visit www.healthfoundation.org.

About the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) The American Academy of Family Physicians is the United States' national association of family physicians. It has more than 100,300 members in the 50 states and territories. The Academy was founded in 1947 to promote and maintain high quality standards for family doctors who provide comprehensive health care to the public. For more information please visit www.AAFP.org.

The American Academy of Family Physicians' Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care publicly launched the Med School Mapper project back in November, 2010 Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (for details, please refer to the initial annoucement here).

We are now scheduling webinars to showcase this unique tool. The first webinar will take place on Tuesday, March 15, at 2:00PM. Please visit the registration page to sign up for the online session.

Amidst AAMC and COGME recommended expansion of medical education, principally through expansion of existing training sites, there is little mention and measurement of how the large investments of public dollars meet the needs of the citizens. In response to this, the Macy Foundation is funding the Medical Education Futures Study. This response is consistent with Macy's mission to promote and evaluate the social responsiveness and mission of each medical school. Its ranking of schools by social accountability criteria is a novel first step in considering their social impact on a national scale. However, as state policymakers attempt to direct expansion funding forecasting for their own regional social and health care access needs, they have few tools for understanding the local and regional impact of schools. Neither national rankings, nor workforce models can truly capture the regional impact of training sites. The Robert Graham Center has created the Med School Mapper to study the means of demonstrating such an impact, using geographic and policy analyses of individual medical schools' graduates.

The American Academy of Family Physicians' Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care publicly launched the Med School Mapper project on November 1, 2010, with funding provided by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.

Amidst American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) and Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME) recommended expansion of medical education, principally through expansion of existing training sites, there is little mention or measurement of how the large investments of public dollars meet the needs of the citizens. In response to this, the Macy Foundation funds the Medical Education Futures Study (MEFS), whose main mission is "to highlight the social mission of medical education during the current period of medical school expansion and potential major health care reform. " This ranking of schools by social accountability is a novel step in understanding their social impact on a national scale. However, as state policymakers attempt to direct expansion funding in terms of accountability to their own regional, social and health care access needs, they have few tools for understanding the local and regional impact of schools. Neither national rankings nor workforce models can capture the regional impact of training sites.

The Robert Graham Center has been studying means of demonstrating such an impact, using geographic and policy analyses of individual medical schools' graduates (both allopathic and osteopathic). Using novel approaches to analyzing and displaying regional impact, the Med School Mapper will give planners essential information for directing and evaluating medical school expansion and its impact on access and other social aims. This tool utilizes American Medical Association (AMA) data, and ranks states and their medical schools on various areas of practice and the number and percent of graduates retained in state. The Mapper tracks the graduate footprint from a state, or medical school within that state, to provide a clear visualization of the practice locations of graduates by county, their penetration rates within counties, and information about the types of areas and specialties in which these graduates practice in order to provide data detailing how well a particular state or school meets its mission of social accountability.

Figure 1. State Footprint

Figure 2. School Footprint

The HealthLandscape team is in Washington, DC this week finishing up the development of HealthLandscape Version 3.0. We've been putting in long hours with our friends at Blue Raster and the Robert Graham Center making improvements to the current HealthLandscape. When HealthLandscape V3 is released, users will have access to a number of new tools including quick geocodes, quick maps, drawing tools, improved printing capabilities, and easy data exports, just to name a few.





We're very excited about the new developments. Many more details and final release date coming soon!