Multiple measures on the Environmental Public Health Tracking Network

Area of Science:

• Environmental health
• Public health informatics
• Data integration

Background:

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program developed the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network (Tracking Network).
• The Tracking Network integrates standardized electronic data to provide scientific information on environmental exposures, health conditions, and their spatial-temporal relations.
• Current functionality allows data exploration across geographies and time for a single data type, but not for multiple data types simultaneously.

Purpose of the Study:

• To enhance the Tracking Network's capability to query and display multiple data types concurrently.
• To enable users to explore trends and potential associations among diverse health and environmental data.
• To improve the exploration of community environmental health status.

Main Methods:

• A multidisciplinary team was assembled to address the complexities of viewing multiple measures.
• The team followed an iterative process including requirements gathering and segmentation into functional areas.
• Proposals were submitted and evaluated to address the identified functional areas for system development.

Main Results:

• Development of system functionality to query and display disparate data types simultaneously in a comparable way.
• Enabling the exploration of multiple environmental and health data measures within the Tracking Network.
• Facilitating hypothesis formulation and analysis of trends and relationships across various data.

Conclusions:

• The addition of multi-measure viewing significantly enhances the Tracking Network's utility for users.
• Public health practitioners can better analyze environmental health status and explore data relationships.
• This improved functionality supports hypothesis generation and a deeper understanding of environmental health impacts.