Chicago Health Atlas

Overview

The Chicago Health Atlas a place where you can view citywide information about health trends and take action near you to improve your own health.

We display large amounts of data from sources like the City of Chicago and local hospitals so you can get big-picture views of health outcomes in Chicago.

If you are a health data provider and would like to take part in this project, please complete this form and we will contact you right away!

Here’s a look at a neighborhood page for this site:

The Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute is funding the Chicago Health Atlas project.

Partners

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is working with the Chicago Department of Public Health and five local hospitals through Chicago Health Information Technology Regional Extension (CHITREC) to visualize statistics related to public health along with anonymized diagnoses, medications, and laboratory tests as provided by local healthcare institutions. The project is funded by the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute.

Press

The Chicago Health Atlas project was presented at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) National Symposium here in Chicago on November 6. Here’s a description of that talk:

The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago

We are creating a shared data resource to provide policy makers, researchers, community advocates and public health leaders insight into the health of the Chicago community, and identify opportunities to improve care. We specifically focused on developing tools which balanced the need for anonymity of patients and providers, while preserving uniqueness of patients. We created a stand alone Java application to perform standardized data cleaning and pre-processing, hashing of patient identifiers to remove all PHI using the HIPAA compliant SHA-512 algorithm, and measure effective match rate. Initial analysis indicates a 92-99% match rate using this approach as compared with an operational master patient index. To date we have IRB approvals and data extractions underway at three large healthcare institutions throughout Chicago, with three more pending, and parallel development of the data visualization platform. We are extracting diagnoses, medications, and laboratory tests for all patients seen at participating institutions for linking with publicly available citywide data. In this demonstration we will review the design and privacy considerations, and demonstrate use cases of clinical data aggregated across multiple institutions in Chicago and visualized across the Chicago metropolitan area.

Team

Jim Alexander is the Executive Director of the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute. His thinking about health information has been critical to the direction of this project.

Kyla Williams runs this project for the Smart Chicago Collaborative.

Patrice Coleman is the Project Coordinator. Her primary role is to work with new data partners to get aggregate health data and point-level health care locations onto the Atlas.

Derek Eder of Data Made is the technology lead for this project. He’s lead us through a number of mapping iterations and created the data model for handling this complex and varied health data.

Aaron Salmon is the design lead for this project.