Critigen Wants You to Know: Making Sense of Health Data

With an increasing awareness of the cost of healthcare and the relative costs of prevention and treatment, health data are more important than ever to making wise investments in healthcare services and infrastructure.  Healthcare professionals, politicians and ordinary citizens all have an interest in understanding the state of our health and contributing to solutions.

In late Spring 2012, we launched a free iPad app to help executives, health professionals and ordinary citizens visualize and understand the Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI).  With theHealth Indicators iPad app, anyone can view the indicators by region, state or county, comparing nearby areas and see trends by area.  The app also supports the classic ‘rollup’ functionality of business intelligence, grouping indicators by category and providing an overall assessment of the category for each region, allowing users to drill into each category to see specific metrics at various geographic levels.

We believe this app is a game changer for health data.  We've taken health data out of the monstrous databases, zip files or CSVs and put the data in a mobile GIS and applied informational design principles, allowing our users to quickly zoom to their area of interest (filter the data) and focus on what’s important.  A big “thank you!” goes out to Bill Davenhall at Esri for helping us ensure the app speaks clearly to a wide cross section of health users.

We launched the app as a corporate citizenship initiative, using our geospatial technology and mobile expertise to make health indicators data accessible to everyone.  We also hope it inspires the Health community to embrace the potential that geographic information has to improve the way we invest in healthcare, prevention and infrastructure.

Anyone with an iPad can download Health Indicators free from the Apple App store and take it for a test drive. The data are organized in categories to make them more accessible to ordinary people and to health care professionals.

Reprinted from the Critigen blog.