A new Web portal unveiled in February by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is designed to provide key health data and health indicators for researchers, policy-makers and health professionals.
The Health Indicators Warehouse includes a “vast collection of health and health care indicators,” according to HHS officials, along with new technologies in place to support the ease of accessing the data.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the Health Indicators Warehouse “a new public resource needed to fuel development of innovative information technology applications needed to improve health and health care decision-making.” The idea is to provide a single, user-friendly source for national, state and community health indicators and to link those indicators to evidence-based interventions.
The new resource, accessible at www.healthindicators.gov, is part of the HHS Open Government Plan and the Community Health Data Initiative, both of which address data transparency. The warehouse includes health indicators from a variety of HHS data sources. Those indicators include characteristics that describe population health, such as life expectancy, mortality and disease incidence or prevalence. They also include determinants of health such as health risk factors, health behaviors and physical environments as well as such measures as health care access, quality, cost and use. Indicators may be defined for a specific population, geographic area or political jurisdiction.
As of mid-February, the warehouse had nearly 1,200 health indicators collected from more than 170 data sources.
“This resource is equipped with modern information services for the purpose of enhancing the dissemination and use of these valuable collections to improve community-level health practices,” said Edward Sondik, PhD, director of the National Center for Health Statistics.
Users can browse the Health Indicators Warehouse by topic, by geography and by initiative. For example, while most of the warehouse’s indicators have national-level data, many also include data available by state, county and even hospital referral regions. State and federal health indicator initiatives in the warehouse run the gamut from Healthy People 2020 to community indicators on topics such as disabilities, asthma readmission rates and number and percentage of Medicare beneficiaries with diabetes, kidney disease or heart attacks.
The warehouse, developed by the National Center for Health Statistics, includes a glossary of terms, data source descriptions, answers to frequently asked questions and other information, as well as a link to allow people to propose a new indicator. The effort was launched and continues to be supported by a collaboration among HHS agencies and offices. It relies on support and funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Health Resources and Services Administration and HHS branches such as the Office of Minority Health, the Office of Adolescent Health and the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
One goal of the warehouse is to support the creation of ever-strengthening technologies that will eventually allow even more access to and application of the health indicators data.
“We recognize that one of the keys to better health and health care is data-driven decision making at all levels,” said Todd Park, chief technology officer at HHS. “The HHS warehouse lowers the barrier for development of technologies to achieve this goal.”
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
