This article is part of State of Health, a series about how Michigan communities are rising to address health challenges. It is made possible with funding from the Michigan Health Endowment Fund.
Community health dashboards, readily available online resources that compile various health data for different regions, are proliferating across Michigan, allowing residents and local decision-makers to easily view a snapshot of local health statistics.
For example, in Southwest Michigan, the
Sturgis Area Community Foundation (SACF) launched the process of creating a dashboard with a quality-of-life assessment based on feedback from municipalities, public safety officials, nonprofits, businesses, and community members. Operational for only one year,
the dashboard has helped to prioritize funding for programs addressing social determinants of health including housing, educational attainment, child care, and prenatal care.
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Lindsay AguilarLindsay Aguilar.
"What it allowed the foundation to do is hone in on a few issues that were elevated through the data," says SACF Executive Director Lindsay Aguilar. "The data showed us that, in our county, 44% of women who are pregnant are receiving less-than-adequate prenatal care, and a little more than 9% are receiving little-to-no prenatal care. We were ranking last in the state for educational attainment. These were really big pain points."
In response to low educational attainment, SACF added a nontraditional scholarship program to support St. Joseph County adults who hadn’t taken a conventional educational path. These scholarships cover the costs of education-related expenses that help recipients find or maintain employment, increase income, stay in school, learn needed skills, complete certifications, or purchase materials needed to complete their educational program.
"We've got a lot of adults here that didn't take that traditional path," Aguilar says. "We knew that we needed to think outside the box a little bit."
Because the dashboard data elevated housing as a concern for the region, SACF is exploring ways to scale its housing rehabilitation and construction program county-wide.
"It affirmed through our data that household incomes weren't keeping up with home prices and rent, and that there was a need for not just more affordable housing, but all kinds of housing," Aguilar says.
Another pain point was lack of affordable child care. In response, SACF is implementing a regional child care plan in partnership with the
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and the
Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
"The dashboard has been this great catalyst for us. I think that's the benefit," Aguilar says. "We know we've been doing really great work, but we've got a long way to go on some really big challenges. The community is going to benefit by the foundation investing more in those areas that we know are really critical."
K-Connect, a network of public and private Kent County organizations working to ensure all children have a quality education and family and community support, created its community health dashboard 10 years ago. The publicly available
dashboard tracks metrics for health, education, family income, and the "cradle-to-career pipeline." Metrics are identified through a network of 150 partners and 400 individuals, focusing on levers of change like improving low birth weight through doula programs, guiding efforts in building teacher diversity, and initiating other community improvements by highlighting area needs and prompting deeper exploration.
"When we looked at developing a dashboard of metrics, one of the things was making sure that we were able to see outcomes from different important systems," says K-Connect Vice President Mark Woltman. "So we have health metrics, and we also have other metrics related to education, thriving family income, and understanding how our systems in Kent County will function."
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K-ConnectKatie Hop.
K-Connect also partnered with the
Johnson Center for Philanthropy and the
Hispanic Center of Western Michigan to translate the dashboard into Spanish.
"We realized that people's access to those metrics were different depending on how they were situated within our community," says Katie Hop, K-Connect director of communications, adding that the translation improves the dashboard so more residents "can access it, use it, and identify areas that they care for."
Like SACF, K-Connect sought feedback from 150 community partners and partner organizations, 400 community members, and data sources like
The ALICE Report and census information to identify which levers of change to focus on. For instance, Woltman says they decided to emphasize healthy birth, early cognitive development, and high-quality preschool opportunities as measures of kindergarten readiness.
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Mark WoltmanMark Woltman.
"Now, kindergarten readiness has a lot more that goes into it than that," he says. "But as far as a systems approach in Kent County, those are the areas that need to be addressed, improved, and heightened."
Because the K-Connect dashboard identified low birth weight as an issue in the county, a new doula program was initiated. Research has shown that doula-assisted mothers were four times less likely to have a low-birth-weight baby.
"We know when kids are born at a healthy birth weight, they have better odds of being ready for kindergarten, obviously with other supports in place," Woltman says.
In other regions of Michigan, community dashboards help to shape programming for a variety of purposes. In Michigan’s Thumb region, the
Michigan Health Improvement Alliance (MiHIA) dashboard provides data on residents’ health, health disparities, and socio-economic demographics, as well as information on proposing grants, generating reports, and how to use dashboard data to inform programming. In Ottawa County,
Ready for School’s KIDfrastructure dashboard helps evaluate how the local community’s systems, services, and amenities are helping kids thrive at home, at school, and in their neighborhoods, with an emphasis on historically marginalized members of the Ottawa County community. The
Calhoun County Opioid Coalition has used its dashboard to direct programming addressing opioid-related fetal overdoses, opioid overdose education, and naloxone distribution.
The Upper Peninsula Health Care Solutions Upper Peninsula Health Information Exchange is establishing several data dashboards and reporting templates to help improve regional health outcomes throughout the Upper Peninsula.
More dashboards are likely on the way. K-Connect is assisting communities across the state and the country with designing data dashboards in a holistic way to improve their communities.
"[The dashboard] tells us where to go, what questions to ask, and who to talk to," Woltman says. "It doesn’t necessarily give you the answers, but it gives you direction."
Estelle Slootmaker spends most workdays as a journalist and book editor. She also writes poetry and has two books underway: her great great grandmother’s memoir of childhood on Mackinac Island and a children's picture book. You can contact her at [email protected].
Photos courtesy of the subjects.