From Dashboards to Decisions: How PopHIVE and Metopio Are Changing the Way Public Health Teams Use Data
A recap of our recent webinar with Yale School of Public Health’s PopHIVE
What if you could see an RSV surge coming before it hit your emergency departments? What if you could pinpoint exactly which neighborhoods needed a targeted intervention and why?
That's the kind of decision-making that becomes possible when real-time, multi-source surveillance data meets local community context — and it's exactly what the new partnership between PopHIVE at the Yale School of Public Health and Metopio is designed to make a reality for public health departments and hospitals across the country.
We recently hosted a webinar with Will Snyder (Co-Founder & CEO, Metopio), Heather Blonsky (VP of Data, Metopio), Anne Zink (Senior Policy Fellow, Yale School of Public Health), and Dan Weinberger (Professor of Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health) exploring what this partnership looks like in practice. Here's everything we covered.
Why This Partnership Started
Public health teams have never had access to more data. The problem isn’t abundance — it's usability. As Anne Zink put it, drawing on her experience as a practicing emergency physician and former Alaska State Health Officer, the frustration of not having the right data at the right time to make the right call is all too familiar.
PopHIVE (Population Health Information and Visualization Exchange) was built by the Yale School of Public Health to address exactly that. It's a free platform that brings together near real-time, de-identified health data from multiple sources, including CMS, CDC datasets, Epic Cosmos, Google Health Trends, and more, aggregating them into a single accessible view.
Metopio is the platform where that data can go to work. Built specifically for public health departments and hospitals, Metopio supports everything from Community Health Assessments and CHIPs to environmental assessments and performance improvement, all in one unified interface.
Together, the two platforms connect national trends with local context, helping health teams move faster at a time when emerging issues, limited resources, and the pressure to show impact have never been greater.
Seeing It in Action
During the webinar, Dan Weinberger walked attendees through PopHIVE's chronic disease dashboard, showing how multiple data sources — BRFS survey data, Medicare claims, and Epic Cosmos ICD-10 codes — tell meaningfully different stories about diabetes prevalence across states. The takeaway: no single dataset has the full picture, and overlaying them reveals important nuance about controlled versus uncontrolled disease that survey data alone simply can't capture.
Heather Blonsky then demonstrated what happens when that data lands inside Metopio, using RSV as a use case. By visualizing PopHIVE's RSV emergency department visit data alongside positive test rates and Google search trends at the county level, her team was able to show that RSV follows seasonal patterns, even pulling up an example from Cook County showing that they tend to peak earlier while rural Illinois peaks higher. It showed the kind of granularity that really matters when you're designing a targeted intervention.
Heather took it to the next step by layering in social determinants. Crowded housing, cigarette smoking rates, uninsured populations, and preschool enrollment (all mapped at the neighborhood level) reveal exactly where a community health program needs to go and what it needs to address. That's the jump from a dashboard to a decision!
What's Coming Next
The partnership is just getting started. Initial focus areas include respiratory disease, chronic disease, childhood immunizations, and injury and overdose — with plans to expand over time. Current Metopio users already have access to PopHIVE’s data inside their Metopio instance!
As Heather noted, one of the most exciting near-term opportunities is chronic disease timeliness. Conditions like diabetes have historically been slow-moving in the data. But with GLP-1 medications beginning to shift prevalence in real time, PopHIVE's high-frequency clinical data may start to capture those changes well before traditional surveys catch up.
Want to See It for Yourself?
Whether you're a current Metopio customer curious about what's new, or a public health leader looking for a better way to turn data into action, we'd love to show you what the platform can do.