New Data, New Cities: City Health Dashboard Updates

Over the last six months, we’ve been hard at work on some exciting updates to the site. Starting today, users can now access new years of data for eleven metrics across our focus areas of health behavior, health outcomes, physical environment, and social and economic factors. With new years of data, users can see how metrics of health vary over time and in different neighborhoods throughout a city, essential context for policies and programs aimed at addressing these issues:

• Binge Drinking

• Physical Inactivity

• Smoking

• Diabetes

• Frequent Mental Distress

• Frequent Physical Distress

• High Blood Pressure

• Obesity

• Air Pollution

• Park Access

• Violent Crime

We have also re-calculated our Park Access measure for census tract geographies – previously only available at the city level – for all of the Dashboard’s cities. This is an exciting update, giving community leaders, urban planners, city officials, and residents a clearer picture of the challenges facing their communities, better positioning them to drive change at the neighborhood level.

Introducing 10 New Cities

The Dashboard is growing! The Dashboard recently received a grant from New Jersey Health Initiatives to provide access to data on health and the drivers of health for ten small cities in southern New Jersey. The goal of the project is to provide Dashboard data to smaller cities and help build their capacity for evidence-based decision making to tackle local health issues. The new cities are all under population 30,000, so this provides new access to a broad set of health measures that was previously unavailable to them.

These new cities are now incorporated into the Dashboard, offering data on up to 22 metrics across our five focus areas. Where available, data is also disaggregated by demographics, allowing cities to explore population-level health disparities by gender, age, or race/ethnicity. The new cities are:

• Burlington

• Clayton

• Egg Harbor City

• Glassboro

• Hammonton

• Lawnside

• Millville

• Penns Grove

• Pleasantville

• Salem

Do you have questions about any of these exciting updates or how you can use these new data to drive change in your community? Email us or reach out on Twitter!