Health Atlas Allows Stakeholders in Ohio County to Target Disparities
Activate Allen County team has leveraged data from the Allen County Health Atlas to help secure a grant that is geared toward Health Improvement Zones
By David Raths, Healthcare Innovation, March 7, 2024 - Last year Healthcare Innovation spoke with Terry Scoggin, CEO of Titus Regional Medical Center in Mt. Pleasant, Texas, about using data analysis and visualization tools to highlight health disparities in rural Texas communities. In Ohio, stakeholders, including local hospitals, the public health department, and the United Way used the same tools to create the Allen County Health Atlas.
“Activate Allen County” came to life in 2012 when a group of area leaders created a public health initiative committed to improving the health of all Allen County residents. The collaboration began with Centers for Disease Control grants but is now fully funded locally. The collaboration took on a new direction in 2022 as it began to better leverage hyper-local data with the launch of the Allen County Health Atlas, leveraging software from Metopio.
The Allen County Health Atlas, supported by partners like Mercy Health, the Allen County Public Health Department, the county mental health board, the City of Lima and nonprofits like the United Way and the local chamber of commerce, gives the public, community-based organizations, businesses and researchers access to data across Allen County’s 12 cities and towns, 19 ZIP codes, and 35 Census tracts.
“We’ve had this collaboration working for many years prior to the creation of the Health Atlas,” said Kayla Monfort, co-director of Activate Allen County. “Many times we were frustrated with our community health assessments and the tools we had at our disposal prior to the partnership with Metopio. It was just a challenging battle for us, because we didn't think we were seeing all the data we wanted to see and how to compile that. We’re not data scientists. We don't have a lot of extra time, being a staff of two co-directors. But the data is such an important factor in how we do our work.”
“We wanted to leverage the Health Atlas to make data more accessible for a lot of nonprofits,” explained Tyler Smith, director of Community Health-Lima at Bon Secours Mercy Health in Lima, Ohio. “They may be submitting requests for funding through United Way or through ourselves or other large players in the community. It allows all different sectors — healthcare, government, and nonprofit — to move together, because it really does require everybody to have a seat at the table to reach some of the goals that we have in terms of outcomes.”