CDC interactive web app brings health information down to the neighborhood level

A new CDC interactive web app has been started to give local health departments with city- and neighborhood-level health information for the 500 largest U.S. cities in case to better understand the places over which they have jurisdiction and help them in planning interventions that are most required.

The platform—known as the 500 Cities Project—is the outcome of a partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It is targeted at giving regional area estimates for 27 chronic disease measures, concentrating on conditions, behaviors and risk factors that have a negative effect on population health.

These local area estimates are utilized to model the prevalence of chronic conditions like heart disease, arthritis and diabetes, as well as 5 unhealthy behaviors involving the obesity, smoking, insufficient physical activity, binge drinking and deficiency of sleep.

The information comes from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which utilizes the annual telephone surveys to gather state data about U.S. residents regarding their health-related risk behaviors, chronic health conditions and use of preventive services.

Although, to get down below the county level, the agency has applied statistical modeling techniques to the surveillance data to establish city- and census tract-level estimates. Use of the health data for more than 100 million individuals—or about a third of the U.S. population—has produced estimates for the 500 largest American cities and almost 28,000 census tracts within these cities.

“We put our initial information estimates out on the website back in the month of December as part of a soft launch with static map products, and this month we started our revised CDC interactive web app that now incorporates an interactive mapping application,” claims James Holt, team leader for analytic methods at the CDC’s Division of Population Health in Atlanta.

The CDC interactive web app mapping application, deployed on 2010 census population data, enables consumers to zoom in to their neighborhoods and look at regional data, comparing it with that of an entire city. In accordance to Holt, the dataset can be joined with census tract spatial data in a geographic information system (GIS) to produce maps of 27 measures at the census tract level in what he calls a “GIS-friendly” format.

The expectation is that the data can assist to recognize current and emerging chronic health problems facing a city or neighborhood, as well as help in the development and implementation of targeted interventions.

“It is primarily designed as a planning aid,” adds Holt, who asserts that local health officials can use the data estimates to “better understand the geographic distribution of risk factors and health results in their cities.”

Going forward, he says the plan is to update the dataset later this year with 2015 BRFSS data, which involves fifty states, the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico.

Nevertheless, the future of the 500 Cities website is far from secure, in accordance to Holt, who notes that funding for the platform runs out at the end of September. “The long-term outlook is yet a little uncertain, so we are actively pursuing the sustainability and resources to make that happen on continual basis,” he further adds.