State of Delaware
My Healthy Community

The nature of public health and public health data—and public health informatics—required DHSS and Green River to innovate several technological solutions to build a useful, informative MHC. For instance, data sets spanning health outcomes, demographics, and social determinants of health (i.e. local conditions affecting risk and vulnerability) originate from many different sources. Each collects data across different timeframes; each updates over various time periods (some daily, some quarterly, some annually); each employs a particular storage format; and each offers a particular granularity (e.g. patient, ZIP Code, county, or state level). Amalgamating this disparate information into a cohesive framework requires very robust data integration processes and software that can merge and present the data in uniform, usable, accessible forms.

A related user interface and experience (UI/UX) challenge is that, to be effective, MHC must organize information by both health topic and geographic entity. (While hierarchical categorization suffices for much information on the web, public health informatics aims to emphasize relationships between disease, conditions, and demographics.) For MHC, we solved this data-navigation issue by developing an interface that enables simultaneous navigation by both geography and topic.

Finally, local community organizations need detailed, granular, and actionable information to improve health outcomes in their neighborhoods. Yet protecting confidential health information is a paramount concern, and data that is too specific can inadvertently disclose who is sick with what disease. To ensure privacy (and compliance with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) MHC employs statistical and algorithmical processes to automatically aggregate or suppress data over time, space, or attribute (e.g. an overall cancer category instead of separate types) when the platform encounters specified minimum population counts and/or the more complex situation of disclosure via “incompatible” geographic levels (e.g. data from a smaller unit, like a neighborhood, intersecting data from two larger units, like a census block group).