MAY 2016
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Making
Alaska’s health data more accessible to everyone
 InstantAtlasTM Alaska Health Maps showing Alaska BRFSS data for Poor General Health and No Health Insurance, 2011-2013
Ten years ago, state health department staff managing large
sets of data collected from Alaska adults and teenagers realized that information
generated from these data wasn’t being shared as broadly as it should be. The
information was largely in the form of fact sheets and reports that focused
only on a small set of questions, with limited comparison among different
regions or characteristics. If someone wanted to look at the health data in a
different way – see if adults living in one community had higher smoking rates
than adults living in other parts of Alaska, for example – they would need to
contact a data analyst to do a special study of the numbers.
The Section of Chronic Disease Prevention and Health
Promotion started to develop a better way to help Alaskans look at the data in
hundreds of different variations — depending on what they needed to know. They
could do this analysis alone — without needing to contact a data analyst — by
going to a new website, typing in the variables they wanted to study, and then
let the computer program do the analysis for them and report the findings. The
free web resource is called the Alaska Indicator-Based
Information System for Public Health, or simply AK-IBIS. Creating this website was part of the
Section’s Informed Alaskans Initiative to improve access to data that can
inform public health programs, services, and policies at the state and local
level.
The Section adopted AK-IBIS from the Utah Department of
Health as a low-cost web tool that could summarize results from several health
surveys conducted in Alaska. Two of those surveys include the annual Behavioral
Risk Factor Survey System (BRFSS), which studies health-related behaviors
of Alaska adults annually, and the Youth
Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), which studies health and social behaviors of
Alaska high school students every other year.
The Section was able to make great strides in increasing the
availability of health data by using an off-the-shelf software program called GeoWise InstantAtlasTM. This
software helps users visualize the data they are interested in studying. They can
see it in maps, charts, or tables. InstantAtlas was acquired to provide immediate
public access to the bulk of BRFSS data. AK-IBIS improves that access through
Indicator Reports, which provide a brief report on one health topic, and Query
Modules, which allow Internet users to run a real-time analysis that’s tailored
to their specific data needs.
In the summer of 2012, the Section shared its first release
of BRFSS data focused on health behaviors of Alaska adults using the new
InstantAtlas software. People interested in the BRFSS data could now look at 132
different variables — from arthritis to mammograms to vision testing — collected
over the 20 years of surveys between 1991 and 2010. The computer program shared
data for Alaska adults in four regional depictions of Alaska: public health regions, metropolitan
statistical areas, boroughs/census areas, and tribal health organization
regions. People could now look at the data in many ways, instead of just
reading about it in published reports that only looked at it in set ways.
Since 2012, data analysts with the Section have expanded the
number of available variables coming from the BRFSS to 366. To make analysis
easier, these variables have been grouped into 47 health topics or themes — such
as chronic disease (e.g., arthritis), prevention (e.g., cancer screening), and risk
factors (e.g., tobacco use). In order to be responsive to the information needs
for the general population and the Alaska Native health system, data are
presented for the two predominant races of white and Alaska Native residents,
as well all Alaskans within each geographic depiction.
The Section now uses its InstantAtlasTM software
to share results from BRFSS;
YRBS;
the Student
Weight Status Surveillance System (SWSSS) that tracks healthy weight,
underweight, overweight, and obesity in a number of Alaska schools districts; Infectious
Diseases from mandated Conditions
Reportable to Public Health in Alaska; and the sexually transmitted
diseases of chlamydia
and gonorrhea.
AK-IBIS was launched in December 2013 with Indicator Reports
to facilitate tracking of the 25 leading health priorities for Alaska
identified through the publicly driven Healthy Alaskans 2020 process. The
targeted health-related goals for Healthy Alaskans now appear with every table
and figure for each leading health indicator. Although the targets were set
only at the statewide level, numerous demographic and socioeconomic breakdowns
(such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, marital status, education, income, and
poverty) are integrated into the reports to make it easier to assess health
equity. Regional depictions of current
prevalence of the leading health indicators allow local communities to gauge
the impact of their local interventions.
The Section of Chronic Disease Prevention and Health
Promotion is continuously trying to improve AK-IBIS by adding more sources of
public health data, adding new variables to study, and adding more ways the
data can be analyzed. This month, the Informed Alaskans Initiative will be
enhanced with the availability of data on Adverse Childhood Experiences in AK-IBIS,
bringing the number of Indicator Reports up to 75. Updates to the BRFSS (1991-2014) and YRBS
(1995-2015) data in InstantAtlas will be incorporated in the coming weeks. The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring
System (PRAMS) query module is also online. Together these public health data sources will inform the
decision-making of individuals and policymakers in working toward the health
department’s mission to promote and protect the health and well-being of
Alaskans.[1]
Software
and training related to AK-IBIS and InstantAtlas are available from IBIS@Alaska.gov. If you would like to be notified of
enhancements to the Informed Alaskans Initiative, you can sign up here for timely, direct
notification.
References:
-
Priorities.
State of Alaska Department of Health & Social Services website. Access 4/25/2016.
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