Health Atlas

Leslie Durr Joins Smart Chicago as Project Coordinator

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Leslie DurrLeslie Durr  joins the Smart Chicago Collaborative as a Project Coordinator.She will serve as the point person for projects including Chicago Health Atlas, Smart Health Centers, Foodborne, Hive Learning Networks and Youth-Led Tech. She will also be working to add several new projects to our portfolio.

Her experience includes program development and grant management in the non-profit sector, most recently with the Southland Health Care Forum as the Project Director for the State of Illinois Get Covered Campaign.

Leslie has her Master of Science in Human Service Administration from Spertus College and Bachelor of Science in Mass Communications from Jackson State University.

You can follow her work on Twitter.

Please join us in welcoming Leslie Durr.

Health Data Ecosystem is Strengthened by Purple Binder’s Adoption of Open Referral

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Joe Flesh of Purple Binder at the Health Data Consortium Event at 1871, November 2013

Joe Flesh of Purple Binder at the Health Data Consortium Event at 1871, November 2013

At Smart Chicago, we work with a lot of partners to encourage the growth and development of the civic innovation sector of the technology industry. There is a nascent ecosystem that thrives on standards and sharing.

Yesterday we were happy to see a big step forward in the ecosystem as it relates to health data and software, when Purple Binder announced that they had adopted the OpenReferral standard. The announcement centers around some with whom we’ve toiled with over the years.

  • Code for America has been a longtime partner of Smart Chicago— we’ve worked with them since our very start. They have been devoted to an OpenReferral standard to help with the sharing of community resource directory data. Code for America is an indispensable national leader in the work that we care about here at Smart Chicago
  • Purple Binder, a Chicago company that matches people with community services that keep them healthy, has been a partner of Smart Chicago since July 2013, when we hired them to create their first API in order to fuel our Chicago Health Atlas project. They’ve been a shining light here in the civic tech scene— a private company building software that matters while helping others in the ecosystem
  • We also work with mRelief, an app that helps Chicagoans determine their eligibility for government benefits. We support them through our Developer Resources and CUTGroup programs. to help Chicago residents see what social services they qualify for.  Both of these applications use data provided by Smart Chicago’s contract with Purple Binder

Purple Binder’s API is the first to use the Open Referral standard to transmit social services data between two applications. This is a big deal, and a moment worth celebrating, with more work ahead.

Launch of Chicago Health Atlas 3.0

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Last week we launched our third major update to our Chicago Health Atlas project.  This is the most robust version of the Atlas released since its debut in 2012. The Atlas is funded and receives significant thought leadership from the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute. Sprague, and their Executive Director Jim Alexander, has shepherded this program for years.

Chicago Health Atlas, along with all of our other health products like Foodborne Chicago and Smart Health Centers, is managed by Smart Chicago Director of Operations Kyla Williams with lots of help from Program Coordinator Sonja Marziano.

Chicago Health Atlas 1.0

Chicago Health Atlas 1.0

The first version of the Atlas was a simple lookup tool for existing data. DataMade, a local firm that builds custom visualizations, deploys civic apps, and trains people to work with open data, has been an essential tech partner all the way through to this version. The site is based on the Derek Eder’s wildly influential and immensely useful Searchable Map Template. Derek was also important in helping me move from the Weave (Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment) platform and set up a structure that met Smart Chicago’s vision for the site.

Last year we conducted a CUTgroup test on the Atlas and found that users were a little confused with the original navigation.

Continue reading →

Kyla Williams on WBEZ Tech Shift, Talking Chicago Health Atlas

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Here’s Kyla WIlliams of Smart Chicago talking about our Chicago Health Atlas project.

For the past year Chicago Health Atlas has tracked the growing amount of health data available to Chicago residents. The hope is that bringing all the information together in one place can help Chicagoans start to improve their own health. Smart Chicago Collaborative Program Officer Kyla Williams oversees the project and joins us in studio to talk about it.

The New Chicago Health Atlas

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The Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to launch our latest version of the Chicago Health Atlas. Last fall, Smart Chicago conducted user testing on the Chicago Health Atlas. Out of those results, there were several points made on what we could improve. The main one being that it was difficult to find health resources on the site. We’ve taken the feedback from the test and used it as a basis to improve the new site. Here’s a rundown of the new features:

atlasv2resources

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Chicago Health Atlas Data Feeds

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Today we’ve added support for querying the data that appears on Chicago Health Atlas by adding JSON endpoints for the major pages. If you want to get access to the underlying data that drives our maps and charts, just add “.json” to the URL of pretty much any page and we’ve got you covered.

Examples:

You can see all community area and zip code boundaries in Chicago by eyeballing our map:

Chicago Health Atlas Map

Or you can see the raw data http://www.chicagohealthatlas.org/places.json:

Chicago Health Atlas Places JSON

You can see all birth rate data by year or see the data all at once.
Birth rate data for the Loop area with confidence intervals as json.

Thanks to Dan Sinker and Cory Nissen for asking for this feature and Derek Eder for getting it done lickety-split.

 

 


See also Cory’s method for querying this site– thanks for doing this, Cory.

Have at it!

The Launch of Chicago Health Atlas

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Today we’re happy to announce the launch of our latest project, the Chicago Health Atlas, where you can view citywide information about health trends and take action near you to improve your own health.

The Chicago Health Atlas is a place where you can view citywide information about health trends and take action near you to improve your own health.

You can read all about the making of the Chicago Health Atlas on our project page. It’s quite a story of collaboration. We pulled sprawling amounts of city-wide health data into a cohesive view of health near you.

  • It all starts with Otho S.A. Sprague Memorial Institute, the project funder, and Jim Alexander, the Institute’s Executive Director and the conceptual leader behind the project
  • We worked with Abel Kho and some of the largest providers of health care in Chicago to develop tools which balanced the need for anonymity of patients and providers, while preserving uniqueness of patients. Read more about their work here
  • Eric Jones and Jamyia Clark of the Chicago Department of Public Health have been instrumental in shepherding the CDPH data into the Atlas— explaining the data, advising on presentation, and generally acting as an intermediary between the Web development and health informatics sides of the project. He also presents the project to the health science community at places like the 2013 Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Annual Meeting

Read more about data sources on the Chicago Health Atlas About page.

On the Smart Chicago side, Program Officer Kyla Williams oversees all of our health initiatives and has been a great leader. Long-time consultant Derek Eder of Data Made has been essential to the success of this project. His deep experience with mapping Chicago things has been a huge natural resource. Aaron Salmon of Auraworks is the design lead for this project.

Patrice Coleman is our Project Coordinator in charge of outreach. Want to take part? Let’s do it.

Chicago Health Atlas Presentation at AMIA 2012

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This morning Abel Kho and a number of his colleagues presented “The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago” at the AMIA 2012 conference at the Conrad Hilton here in Chicago.

AMIA 2012: The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago

Abel Kho

AMIA 2012: The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago

Abel N. Kho, and John P. Cashy, Northwestern University; Bala N. Hota, Cook County Health and Hospital Systems; Shannon A. Sims, Rush University; Brad A. Malin, Vanderbilt University; William L. Galanter, MD, University of Illinois

The talk covered a number of topics, including program design, anonymizing records,  Institutional Review Board approvals, and data extractions (diagnoses, medications, and laboratory tests for all patients seen at participating institutions).

Today we also published some new data that came out of their work— diabetes rates by zip code from 2006 – 2010. Stay tuned for more data and an updated user interface on the Chicago Health Atlas in the weeks to come.

AMIA 2012: The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago

Abel Kho shows the Chicago Health Atlas

Chicago Health Atlas With Diabetes Info