Building the data infrastructure communities need to understand and act on their own health risks
The Challenge
Community health decisions are often made with inadequate, outdated, or inaccessible data, especially in rural communities. Evidence sits behind paywalls, is buried in technical reports, or is suppressed because small populations don't meet statistical thresholds. The communities most in need of targeted resources are often the ones least equipped to document that need.
Our Approach
We design and build community-based surveillance systems that invert the traditional research pipeline. Instead of publishing findings in academic journals and waiting for practitioners to find them, we put data tools directly in the hands of local decision-makers: county public health officials, community coalitions, state agencies, and behavioral health providers.
Our surveillance systems monitor alcohol and drug-related harms, overdose trends, treatment utilization, and the social determinants of health at the county, city, and neighborhood level. We pair these systems with human-centered design so that even data novices can extract actionable insights.
Featured Work
- Iowa Alcohol Insights Platform and community-specific Alcohol Density Monitoring Dashboards, deployed in partnership with the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division
- Iowa Health Snapshots Series: automated community health profiles covering nearly 50 health metrics from CDC Places data, designed for rural health administrators with limited data capacity
- Iowa Community Analytics & Profile Dashboard: neighborhood-level analysis across key American Community Survey indicators
- Cerro Gordo County and Polk County substance use surveillance systems, building scalable local data infrastructure
- Technical assistance to community-based health organizations across the state
Funding & Partners
SAMHSA, Iowa Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy, Iowa Office of Drug Control Policy, Polk County Behavioral Health, Cerro Gordo County Public Health, Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division, Rural Opioid Technical Assistance Regional Center (ROTA-RC Region 7), Prevention Technology Transfer Center.