Sunny Cleveland skyline.jpg
Census-tract level data for the city of Cleveland, as well as 499 other U.S. cities, is now available through the Centers for Disease Control's 500 Cities project. An interactive tool, launched today, allows users to view and layer 27 different health measures ranging from asthma, diabetes, insurance coverage and many others.
(File photo)
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A new web-based interactive tool released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will let anyone find and search health data at the neighborhood level for 500 U.S. cities that include Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.
The 500 Cities project, a collaboration between CDC, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the CDC Foundation, is part of a nationwide effort to provide this health information for geographic areas smaller than counties. The effort began in 2015 and includes city and census tract-level estimates for 27 chronic health conditions, behaviors, risk factors and preventive service use for the largest 500 cities in the United States.
The overall health data for the city of Cleveland is not new -- it comes from 2013 and 2014 information gathered by CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). What's new is the CDC's use of a statistical modeling tool called small area estimates to predict the geographic distribution of disease and behaviors at the census tract level.
We know that 16.8 percent of all Cleveland adults are diagnosed with diabetes, for example. Now, though, residents, doctors and public health officials can see that the diabetes rate is far higher -- between 23 percent to 37 percent -- in nearly 30 East Side census tracts.
500 Cities project leaders hope that local public health departments and other city leaders will use the data to target health interventions to the neighborhoods most in need, and to spot hotspots where diseases and risky behaviors overlap.
"Measures of health outcomes are generally gathered at the state and county level," said Oktawia Wojcik, a research-evaluation-learning unit program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, speaking to reporters about the project. "This really masks important differences among geographic areas that are smaller than counties, making it difficult to identify health disparities and target interventions."
The 27 measures include:
- Unhealthy behaviors such as binge drinking, smoking, obesity, short sleep duration, and no leisure time activity
- Health outcomes such as arthritis, asthma, cancer, high blood pressure, kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes, bad mental or physical health, lost of all teeth, and stroke
- Use of preventive services such as routine doctor visits, mental health visits, taking prescribed medications, and receiving cholesterol, mammography, and colorectal cancer screenings
Cleveland health officials have mapped some of these measures using BRFSS data in the past but were only able to map the information by seven neighborhood "clusters" due to statistical limitations. The CDC's tool shows data for all outcomes in each of the city's 175 census tracts.
The CDC's interactive tool is also searchable and can be downloaded for statistical manipulation.
"Users can view maps of their city, and zoom in to particular locations," James Holt, Team Leader, Analytic Methods Division of Population Health at CDC said in an email. "If the user enters an address, the map will center on that location if it is part of the city. Users can turn on or off each map layer for all 27 measures to view them one at a time."
There are also "Map Books" for each of the 500 cities with static maps of each of the health indicators and information about the data and methodology available for download. You can find Cleveland's Map Book here.