OASIS

Introducing HealthLandscape Version 3, Beta

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:01:00 -0400

The HealthLandscape team is pleased to announce the Beta launch of HealthLandscape Version 3.

We're opening the new site in its Beta testing stage for public access while we fine tune the layout and controls and finish the development of the modules you're all familiar with, such as Community HealthView and My HealthLandscape. We'll also be soliciting feedback from our Beta users to get an understanding of what you like and don't like about the new site design, and ways that we can improve the usability and flow of the application.

To start using HealthLandscape V3, go to beta.healthlandscape.org. You will need to create a new account to view and use the mapping application. You can use the same email address and password that you used to sign up for the original HealthLandscape, but at this time the accounts will not be transferred over automatically.

HealthLandscape Version 3 is vastly different from the current HealthLandscape in a number of ways. We've designed the new HealthLandscape to be easier to use, with fewer mouseclicks required to get to the data that you need. Instead of wizards and lists of data categories and variables, there are more logical ways to organize and sort the data. This new design allows you to turn tools on and off depending on your data needs, and also allows you to display layers from multiple tools on the map at the same time.

Another way that we're improving the ease of use is through the introduction of Quick Maps and Quick Geocodes, tools that will be introduced to you over the next few weeks as part of a series of blog entries about the details of HealthLandscape V3.

We're very excited to share the new site and hope you enjoy exploring the updates.

The Ohio and Kentucky Health Issues Polls

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:29:00 -0400

The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati has always encouraged and supported data-driven decisions. It is in support of that goal that they started the Ohio Health Issues Poll (OHIP) in 2005. The Kentucky Health Issues Poll (KHIP) was created shortly thereafter, in 2008.

The surveys were developed in order to collect state-level public opinion and health assessment data. They are conducted once a year in partnership with the Institute for Policy Research and cover a variety of topics, including insurance status, concerns about healthcare coverage, healthcare services, and others.

Conducting the polls on a yearly basis results in point-in-time and trended public opinion data as well as state-level trend data. When possible, the Polls use questions from national surveys to provide comparisons to national or regional data.

General information about the Polls, including results from all years, is available on our web site (OHIP/KHIP). The data are available for analysis and download in OASIS.

Stepping Back - What is OASIS?

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:27:00 -0400

OASIS stands for Online Analysis and Statistical Information System. The project is funded by The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati as a way to make the results of research more accessible to its grantees and the general public.

OASIS contains a wide variety of data sources, including the Ohio and Kentucky Health Issues Polls, the Community Health Status Survey, and the Student Drug Use Survey, among many others.

OASIS is made up of three main components: In the Guided Analysis feature, which is intended for novice statistical users, OASIS automatically chooses the appropriate statistical procedures for analyzing user-selected variables. The User-Defined Analysis feature of OASIS allows more experienced statistical users to select the type of analysis they wish to perform on selected variables. OASIS' Mapping component uses GIS (geographic information system) software to generate maps that analyze and present information that is tied to locations on the surface of the earth.

OASIS puts powerful analysis tools in the hands of the general public by allowing users to perform sophisticated data analysis without needing statistical software on their computers. Getting started with OASIS is simple. Go to http://www.oasisdataarchive.org/, register for an account, and log in. Once logged in, you will have access to a large amount of data from local and state health surveys. In addition to the online user interface, OASIS provides data in several different formats, allowing users to download data for their own personal use in programs such as SAS and SPSS. OASIS is free to all users.

The OASIS Data Archive Team Welcomes James Schwab

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:26:00 -0400

On January 24th, James Schwab joined The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati as the new director, president, and chief executive officer. Schwab, who previously announced his retirement as the Cincinnati market president for U.S. Bank, has long been deeply involved with Cincinnati's non-profit community. He is chairman of the board of TriHealth and serves on the board of the Health Improvement Collaborative. Schwab also serves as trustee of The University of Cincinnati Foundation; The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; Hoxworth Blood Center; The Children's Home; The Cincinnati Zoo; the Research and Education Committee of Cincinnati's Children's Research Foundation; and the Southwest Ohio Region Workforce Investment Board. Schwab is also a trustee of the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber. Jim Schwab is a lifelong Cincinnati resident and has held many positions with companies that dot Cincinnati's skyline including Great American Holding Company, Xtec, General Cable Corporation, American Financial Corporation, Corporex and The Baldwin-United Corporation. Schwab graduated from the University of Cincinnati and the University of Michigan Law School. The OASIS Data Archive team welcomes Mr. Schwab to the Health Foundation. We look forward to working together.

OPEG 2010 Spring Exchange

Thu, 13 May 2010 08:45:00 -0400

On May 14th, 2010, OPEG (the Ohio Program Evaluators' Group) will be holding its annual Spring Exchange at the Quest Conference Center in Columbus, Ohio. The event will provide interdisciplinary practitioners with the opportunity to hear expertise on using Mixed Methods in evaluation. These sorts of evaluations rely upon several paradigms, methodologies, and data analytic techniques. Attendees will have a unique opportunity to hear Dr. Donna M. Mertens, a recognized expert in this area and keynote for the conference. Several presentations will cover the use of mixed methods in areas like health and education. These projects may be organic and responsive to stakeholder needs, making designs and analysis increasingly complex. The OPEG 2010 Spring Exchange Agenda is available at http://www.opeg.org/pdf/2010-spring-exchange-agenda.pdf To register, visit OPEG at http://www.opeg.org

How to Build a Hurricane

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:37:00 -0400

At a 1972 conference, meteorologist Edward Lorenz gave a talk titled as a question, "Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" He was asking if one small action could set off a cascade of events that would culminate in something big and unexpected. He'd been working on a computer program to predict weather and punched in numerical data to six places past the decimal point. The program predicted, say, mild rain, light winds, and a high pressure system.

Later he re-ran the same program and, for simplicity's sake, rounded the data to three places past the decimal point. The rounded data only varied by thousandths, but this time the program predicted hard rain, gale force winds, and a low pressure system. In short, a hurricane.

Lorenz was explaining chaos theory ? the theory that one small change, like the single flap of a butterfly's wings, can produce an entirely different, and possibly catastrophic, outcome.

Last summer, while working as a public health nurse visiting mothers and infants newly discharged from the hospital for their postpartum and newborn assessments, a young man I didn't know and had never met flashed a gun at me. I was walking toward the back of a set of townhouses. He sat on the stoop directly across, rose from sitting to standing as I neared and lifted his left arm slightly as I said, "Good morning." Noticing an L-shaped opaque black object in his left hand, I stared longer than I had a right to ? at the hollow double eyes at the tip and watched at every moment for the plane of it's face to be flush with mine. It never was.

He gestured with it nonchalantly, easily, as if it were a can of pop. He did not threaten, but wondered aloud, as he waved the gun for emphasis, if it might rain.

Why would this kid just be sitting on his porch with a gun in his lap? It was a Saturday morning. The neighborhood was sleeping. Was he heading out to get someone? Was he waiting for someone to get him?

I didn't complete the home visit, but turned and walked back to my car.

In 2008, 7th through 12th graders in the Cincinnati region were asked: "In the past year, have you ever carried a gun to school?" Six percent reported they had carried a weapon on school property during the previous 30 days. The chart below compares the percent of females and males in the 7th ? 12th grades who reported carrying a gun to school in 2008.

Source: Coalition for a Drug-Free Cincinnati, PRIDE Survey (OASIS, 2010)

In the United States in 2005, about 1.5 million students ages 12 to 18 were victims of non-fatal crimes at school. Eight percent of all students and 10 percent of males (as compared to six percent of females) surveyed in grades 9 through 12 reported threats of injuries with a weapon on school property in the previous 12 months (USDE, 2007). With over 55.7 million children enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade, preventing and reducing school violence is a public health priority.

While this item is only one measure of a two-page survey, carrying a gun to school is an indicator of other community health concerns: low levels of civic engagement, community-wide symptoms of trauma, higher rates of preterm birth, higher rates of illicit drug use. And all together, these separate elements coalesce as the perfect storm: violence.

Unlike meteorology, we don't predict in public health, we assess and plan using the web of causation as a model. We'd look at the kid on the stoop with the gun and trace backward, examining his risk factors. And even though I didn't know this kid, the research suggests that all of the following would be likely characteristics of his life:

The chances he was preterm: high.
The chances that he was abused: high.
The chances he abuses illicit drugs: high.
The chances he was bullied: high.
The chances a weapon has been pointed at him in his lifetime: high.
The chances he never finished high school: high.

But if, as Lorenz suggested, a hurricane might be prevented by a change in one variable by the thousandths, might the perfect storm of school violence be similarly prevented by community programs that positively influence any of the above factors, even a little? Such as WIC, drug prevention and treatment programs, parenting programs? Examining this will be the subject of my next blog.

For further reading: Resnick, M.D., Ireland, M., Borowsky, I. (2004). Youth violence perpetration: what protects? What predicts? Findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Journal of Adolescent Health 35(424), 1 ? 10.

This blog is the third in a series about school violence.

OASIS
The Online Analysis and Statistical Information System
Turning Statistics into Information
Take me to OASIS!

Data Driven Decision Making workshop

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Data Driven Decision Making (deadline to register Tuesday, March 9th) This workshop introduces user to HealthLandscape and OASIS, two web-based tools that have been developed by the Health Foundation to make local data available and usable. These tools let users create simple, effective tables, charts, and maps of local data that inform policy and drive decision making. http://www.healthfoundation.org/events/datadriven.html Date: March 16, 2010 (registration deadline 3/9/2010) Time: 9:30 a.m. ? 4:00 p.m. with registration at 9:00 a.m. Instructors: Mark Carrozza, Health Landscape, LLC; Jennifer Chubinski, The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati Place: Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, 3805 Edwards Road, 5th Floor, Cincinnati, OH 45209 Rate: Nonprofit: $35/person; Market rate (applies to for profit agencies): $200/person. CEUs: 5.0 clock hours This workshop has a CANCELLATION FEE of $50. This means if you register, and do not attend or send a substitute, your organization will be billed $50. The deadline to cancel without penalty is March 9, 2010.

Adolescent Males, Weapons, and Schools

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:00:00 -0400

"To really try to be informed and literate today," David Foster Wallace wrote, "is to feel stupid nearly all of the time." He called the sound of U.S. Culture, "Total Noise" and despaired that partisan news outlets are the only way we currently know how to manage the deluge of information. The news outlet I choose acts as a filter, so if my politics are liberal, I will stick with MSNBC or CNN to filter my data. If I am conservative, I'll stick with Fox. I trust them. I trust their point of view. But tackling all that raw data myself? Well, now we just got back to me feeling stupid all of the time.

Two short weeks ago, my intent was to look through all Cincinnati Police Department street level data for patterns, once I found patterns I would narrow to a population with the riskiest behavior, say women of child-bearing age who carry firearms, then I would plan an intervention to reduce this behavior.

But, with over 90,000 pieces of street level data, I was overwhelmed. Aside from compelling, but not strong, numbers on men who carry and use firearms, the rest of the data did not fall into any discernible pattern. Women of childbearing age in Cincinnati commit crimes of immediate financial need -- larceny, non-aggravated burglaries -- but not in overwhelming numbers.

And my conclusion was no conclusion, since there were no data spikes hitting me right between the eyes. Where's the statistician to whom I could outsource pulling back the curtains and opening up the closets of 90,000 bits of data? Surely there's a painless computer program that would tell me which population needs an intervention the most?

But even more concerning than not picking out the pattern are the ethical implications of choice when one must move forward. When I make the choice about the population of focus, how will I know it's not biassed? Because when choice becomes bias, affecting randomization, it inches ever closer to the dark side of judgment. Discrimination. The Tuskegee Syphilis Trials, the HeLa cell line. We need our filters to manage the deluge, but what happens when the filter leaves the most important stuff out, like justice?

So getting back to women of childbearing age, I wanted to pick them. I'd spent the last two years working for the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), a nurse home visitation program for at-risk mothers. Within the families served, NFP has produced remarkable improvements in (among other things) crime outcomes. The World Health Organization cites women's health as a leading indicator of the health of a community. When a woman's health is improved, twelve other people (those she supports, lives with, works with or interacts) will be positively impacted, too.

But during most of my home visitations with mothers and babies, the male counterparts were nearly absent. Not a generalization. Just what I saw. Who were these young men? Counterparts in the creation of life, but nearly invisible now. Without them, the mother I visited wouldn't be there. The baby wouldn't be there. I wouldn't be there.

Starting in 2000, The Coalition for a Drug Free Cincinnatiasked 5th through 12th graders in five southwestern Ohio counties if they had carried a gun to school six or more times in the past year. In 2008, 2.69 percent of the females and more than 3.57 percent of the males responded yes. If you find that number underwhelming, remember that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, youths bringing weapons to school is tied to a host of correlated risky behaviors ? criminal activity, substance use and abuse, domestic violence.

While these male adolescents are not necessarily the invisible fathers from my past work, they do paint a portrait of who our young men in this region are.

So, there you have it -- young males, weapons, schools. Sometimes filtering leaves the most important things out, but maybe in this case, a wider world might be exposed.

OASIS
The Online Analysis and Statistical Information System
Turning Statistics into Information
Take me to OASIS!

Connecting the Dots

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:00:00 -0400

After the 2009 Christmas Day bomber's attempted strike, media reports were saturated with the phrase, "connecting the dots." Many pieces of information existed within US intelligence agencies on the bomber's connection to and increasing fascination with terrorist ideologies, his time spent in an al Qaeda recruitment camp, and mounting concerns from his father that his behavior would presage violence. Lots of data was out there, but how to contextualize it so meaningful action could be taken to prevent harm was, and still is, the challenge.

Over the next 10 weeks, I will be looking at violence data from the Coalition for a Drug Free Cincinnati and other national, state and local databases for the purpose of applying a public health framework to this data. Instead of looking at violence as isolated events, the application of an epidemiological approach can hopefully generate a more useful approach to developing a program relevant to the promotion of health for an identified population experiencing violence in Hamilton County, Ohio.

In the June 22, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, journalist John Seabrook wrote about how the epidemiological approach to crime within the Cincinnati Police Department ultimately led to a an understanding of Northside's Taliband gang that led to an arrest of 22 of its gang leaders and the effective end to the gang. The New Yorker

Right now, I am just getting started to dig through a mountain of data. And like an archeologist, I've only started to get dirt under my fingernails. What aspect of violence will I chose to examine? Well, I'll have to see what I start to uncover. I hope you, kind reader, will join me on this 20 week journey through the selection of a specific aspect of violence and then an analysis of public health models. The aim is to select one model with strong evidence backing an intervention that could be applied to what I uncover.

In addition, I will be partnering with the Cincinnati Police Department and riding with them through districts ? one in particular, as yet to be selected ? with hopes of bringing the insights of the field to all this data collection.

Lots of data. Lots of layers of information to get through. But one goal: connecting the dots. Hope you will join me on the journey.

OASIS in 2010 and Beyond

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:00:00 -0400

Talk about being careful what you wish for! This past week I was working with a colleague at the Foundation to report on the demographic and health characteristics of the Cincinnati region. While I was gathering information, I was struck again by how far we've come in the Democratization of Data. Think of the technological changes the past few decades have brought. The end of the 1970's saw the transition from dark libraries with shelves and shelves of books to brightly-lit mainframes with shelves and shelves of round-reel tapes, JCL and batch jobs. The 1980's and early 1990's saw the movement of data from mainframe tapes and cartridges to shiny CD-ROMs and data jukeboxes with glass platters and robotic arms. The new millennium brought data even closer, ironically, by moving it further away to the Internet and the beginnings of cloud computing. Now we have ready access to a world of data . . .

Holy Mackerel! Now we have ready access to a world of data!!!

The Challenge Ahead From its conception, the vision for OASIS has been to close the gap between the organizations who produce data on one side, and the folks who are trying desperately to "drink from a firehose" of data on the other. The challenge for the coming decade is no longer physical or network access to data; it's making sense of the mountains of information that's available and presenting the information in a way that's intuitive, meaningful and actionable. So, what are we planning to meet the challenge?

As always, we're constantly updating and expanding our library of available data, such as the Ohio Health Issues Poll, the Kentucky Health Issues Poll, the Student Life Attitudes and Behaviors Survey, and others.
We're developed new resources to compiling detailed metadata, or 'data about data,' to significantly enhance the usability of the data in OASIS and improve the user interface.
To improve the OASIS user interface, we're developing graphical Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to give users a more interactive experience ? ranging from quick access to top-level summary statistics to sophisticated statistical tools for in-depth analysis.
During 2010, we'll also be explicitly linking OASIS to HealthLandscape (the Foundation's web-based GIS platform) to allow spatial analysis of OASIS data.

An exciting decade is behind us, and an exciting (and challenging!) future lies ahead. If you would like to know more about OASIS and how it can benefit you and your organization, please feel free to contact us at (513) 458-6722 or MCarrozza@HealthFoundation.org

OASIS
The Online Analysis and Statistical Information System
Turning Statistics into Information