Community Environmental Health Data and Research (CEHDR): A Health Data Dashboard for Community-Centered Education of Environmental and Community Health Data

Background: Community leaders understand the health of the populations they serve, but lack access to structural and social determinants of health (SDOH) data for small local areas that is disseminated in useful ways for local efforts and actions. This study aims to harness health science and health geography data for social good through a community participatory research project. We are piloting the Community Environmental Health Data Access and Research web app (CEHDAR), and through focus group interviews, explored community workers’ perceptions of the usability of 1) community and environmental health data, 2) the CEHDAR app, and 3) the app’s relevance to their work.

Methods: Utilizing the SDOH & Place Community Toolkit with human-centered design principles, we use customized coding and packages in R Shiny to develop our interactive CEHDAR web app with user transparency, legibility, and agency in mind. The web app featured Illinois census-tract-level data on physical and mental health outcomes, socio-demographics, healthcare, environmental exposures, and climate events, drawn from publicly-available sources including the Centers for Disease Control, Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Census Bureau. We obtained IRB approval for small focus groups to explore questions in one-hour discussions with community workers recruited by convenience sampling.

Results: Our web app spatialized and visualized data using thematic maps organized into different tabs, explained data sources, and converted variable measures into meaningful, publicly interpretable numbers (e.g., high air pollution days instead of PM 2.5 concentrations). It incorporated user-interactivity, such as location search, data variable selection, and census tract comparisons on panels aside the maps. Thematic maps were accompanied by county-level charts, showing the selected county’s value in comparison to the average across all counties in the state. Select tabs paired maps for side-by-side comparison, highlighting the intersection of marginalized sociodemographic populations and environmental attribute distributions. Thematic coding and analysis from initial focus groups (N=8) of social workers, educators, nonprofit employees, and activists revealed challenges in finding data to use and trust (e.g., concerns about who owns and motives behind public data). Enthusiasm was expressed for the CEHDAR app for transparent, comprehendible, and interactive information of different and multiple data points through maps and the accompanying charts. Participants in the focus groups also indicated that the app is relevant and informative for their work by identifying locally relevant layers and dimensions of health vulnerabilities and structures (e.g., neighborhoods with low private health insurance coverage, less medical professional density, potential lead exposure, or high number of extreme heat days).

Conclusion: This study provides initial evidence for an engaging and influential way to share and disseminate community and environmental health and health geography data that can be employed to raise community awareness of how sociodemographic, environmental, and health attributes intersect in neighborhood environments. This open-access tool can be translated into meaningful uses and actions within communities by local workers and organizers, with positive implications for empowerment and informed participation. Thus, the human-centered interactive web apps of spatialized health data provide an avenue to engage in communities and work towards reducing health disparities.