2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

242 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
They are also helping other communities that are trying to develop
similar systems through technical assistance, including developing a
hot-spotting toolkit with the support of the Commonwealth Foundation.
25 The coalition also received a 2014 John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation News Challenge grant to develop an open-source health
care dashboard in partnership with a technology development firm.
This system will enable other communities to organize and upload their
own data (O’Connor 2014). The system will aggregate the individuallevel
data by demographic group and geography so that community
groups and policymakers alike can better understand patterns of health
care use through a publicly accessible online site. Even with technical
assistance on data development, community process, and technology,
challenges to expanding the practice remain, including hospital
bureaucracy, federal financing practices, and entrenched institutional
interests (Blumgart 2012). Nonetheless, opportunities for smarter use
of data in health care will increase as the Affordable Care Act spurs
more and more health records to be moved to electronic and integrated
systems. The Camden Coalition of Health Care Providers offers
an inspirational model of how these data can both improve care for
individual patients and be used by stakeholders to develop community-level
interventions.
Conclusion
The examples and case studies from this chapter reveal the ingredients
needed to overcome the challenges in getting data used in communities.
Each organization was locally based and participating in civic conversations
about issues facing the community. Each took advantage of newly
available data or presented data in a fresh way. The organizations carefully
cleaned and tabulated the data, but they recognized that statistics
and colorful maps were insufficient. The capacity and persistence of local
institutions and individual champions were essential to any progress. The
information needed to be shared with the groups, whether inside or outside
of government, that had the means and motivation to address the
problem. Most of the examples cover multiple years, showing that the process
of assembling a shared understanding of a problem and the appropriate
response is slow. Direct cause-and-effect relationships between the
data presentation and community change are difficult to trace, but the