The Department of Health & Human Services has recently made an unprecedentedly ambitious release of public health information under the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI).

What is CHDI?

CHDI is a collaborative effort among government and non-government organizations to help americans understand health and health care system performance in their communities, thereby facilitating measures to improve the overall health. As part of this initiative, a data hub is currently under development.

Simply speaking, the initiative provides:

• Health indicators—Measurable characteristics such as life expectancy, mortality and disease incidence
• Determinants of health—Health behaviors, health risk factors, physical environments, and socioeconomic environments
• Health care accessibility—Cost, quality, and use

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is working with data, content, and application experts to develop an interactive system that will make health related data accessible to everyone.

With this data you could:

• Analyze leading health issues or causes of death with your community
• Assess environmental health (levels of various gases, pollution levels)
• Identify risk factors
• Provide health care
• Find which communities have very good health or which communities have the highest number of accidents

And this just the tip of the iceberg. As more data becomes available, we could see more web applications or even mobile apps, which use this data. We could see hospitals and healthcare organizations, using this data to validate the results of their campaigns.

Here is a small list of tools that exist to assess this kind of data:

• Community Health Status Indicators Report—Provides detailed health analysis of your community
• Community Health Rankings—Ranks communities based on health

How Does This Help Improve Marketing and Advertising Efforts? 

This is good news for the marketing and advertising organizations, as it could help them to:

• Focus their efforts on a specific population or community
• Provide better analytics
• Demonstrate and validate the results of their campaigns

All this could lead to greater innovation in the area of healthcare, focus the advertising and marketing efforts and people benefit by making better healthcare decisions.