As part of the Center’s ongoing work on the Big Data Demonstration Project, director Steve Woolf, and one of the Center’s community engagement leaders, Amber Haley, traveled to San Diego to meet with the project’s Community Design Team as well as research partners from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the San Diego County Department of Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA). The one-day meeting was hosted by the UCSD Qualcomm Institute in the university’s data visualization laboratory, which allowed meeting attendees to view and interact with data through the university’s cutting-edge technology resources.
The purpose of the meeting was to bring together community leaders with data scientists and public health professionals to interact with data on thousands of indicators, including demographic information, data on housing and the built environment, and consumer data on shopping, in order to address community priorities. Data were collected by scientists at Qualcomm and San Diego HHSA from three major sources: San Diego County HHSA for Demographic and Medical Encounters data; Esri market potential research data; and the SANDAG Healthy Communities Atlas. The Community Design Team, a group of 17 community representatives of San Diego County who are actively involved in the county’s long-term health initiative Live Well San Diego, provided feedback on an interactive platform designed by the data scientists with guidance from public health researchers.
Following an introduction and overview about the data being presented, Community Design Team members broke out into three groups to examine neighborhood differences across San Diego County via interactive digital displays such as maps that provided a community profile with detailed demographic information on each neighborhood. Users could click on different areas of the maps to view additional information about economic conditions, educational attainment, and other factors that impact health outcomes in each area. Guided by community engagement researcher Amber Haley and other group facilitators, Community Design Team members explored the data, discussed correlations among the data, and suggested changes to the platform that would make it more user-friendly and practical for communities in order to advance local health priorities. The three groups reconvened following the breakout sessions to report on findings, to discuss any questions that came up, and to share their reactions to the data demonstration. Following are pictures from the September meeting.
