Determining Community Health Status Priorities in an Online Analytic Processing (OLAP) Environment

Abstract

Introduction: The determination of priorities is an essential component of community health status assessment. Yet, there is an acknowledged need for a systematic method which will utilize data in standardized comparisons to yield priorities based on objective analyses.Method: We have deployed a web-based system with: a flexible online analytic processing (OLAP) interface; multiple sources of event-level data conformed to common definitions in a data warehouse structure; and, centralized technical infrastructure with distributed analytical capabilities. The PRIORITIZATION TOOL integrated into the system takes full advantage of the granularity of multidimensional sources of data to: apply a series of defined objective criteria; vary the weight of those criteria and detect the reordering of the rankings in real-time; and, apply the prioritization algorithm to different categories of health status outcomes.Results: In our example, mortality outcomes for Miami-Dade County, Florida, were considered with three different weighting combinations of the four primary ranking criteria. The resultant analyses return markedly different mortality priority rankings based upon the selection and weighting of the criteria.Conclusion: Rankings of community health outcomes based on a static set of criteria with fixed weighting factors may not provide sufficient information necessary for priority setting and may, in fact, be misleading.

Using Electronic Health Records and Data Warehouse Collaboratively in Community Health Centers

“…Because the data in a data warehouse are cleaned, transformed, pre-calculated, and cataloged; they are readily used for analytic operations such as data mining, online analytic processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, or other business intelligence techniques. Data Warehouse and OLAP technologies have been used in health care to support clinical outcomes and population health (Parmanto, 2005;Studnicki, 2010Studnicki, & 2013Triola & Pusic, 2012).…”

Web-Based Geo-Visualisation of Spatial Information to Support Evidence-Based Health Policy: A Case Study of the Development Process of Health Tracks

“…However, with recent advances in webmapping capabilities and the availability of online data, timely access to customised reports and maps of health information at a detailed spatial resolution can now be easily provided to health professionals and decision-makers (Croner 2003;Evans and Sabel 2012;Friedman et a. 2013;Gao et al 2008;Studnicki and Fisher 2013). Online mapping and analytical processing can provide a broad range of data and analytical tools for analysis, visualisation, modelling and planning without the need for expensive software and technical expertise (Kamadjeu & Tolentino 2006), and such interactive mapping tools have been demonstrated to be more useful and preferred by public health professionals over statics maps for comparing health outcomes and risk factors (Cinnamon et al 2009).…”

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