Chicago Health Atlas earns Smart Cities award
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The Chicago Health Atlas, a free community health data resource that residents, community organizations, the media and public health stakeholders can use to search for, analyze and download neighborhood level health data for all of Chicago’s 77 community areas, has been named a Smart 50 Award winner given to innovative urban projects from around the world. The Atlas is developed in partnership with the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH); the UIC School of Public Health; Metopio, a data visualization firm; and the Otho S.A. Sprague Memorial Institute.
“The Chicago Health Atlas is designed so that anyone can review, explore and compare health-related data over time and across communities,” said Nikhil Prachand, MPH in Epidemiology ’95, director of epidemiology at CDPH. “Our hope is that people will use this data to both better understand health in Chicago and identify opportunities to improve health and well-being.”
The Smart 50 Awards are given by Smart Cities Connect and the Smart Cities Connect Foundation, which annually honor the most innovative and smart municipal and regional-scale projects in the world.
Users of the Chicago Health Atlas, which is co-managed by the Population Health Analytics Metrics Evaluation (PHAME) Center at the School of Public Health, can explore data on more than 160 public health indicators from more than 30 participating healthcare, community and research partners.
“We are humbled to share the Smart 50 awards platform with 49 other incredibly transformative awardees from around the world,” said Sanjib Basu, PhD, Paul Levy and Virginia F. Tomasek Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the UIC School of Public Health. “This global award is a distinct recognition of the role of the Chicago Health Atlas in advancing the health of communities and its residents.”
The Chicago Health Atlas is also a place for users to gauge progress of the implementation of Healthy Chicago, the citywide plan to improve health equity and close the racial life expectancy gap.
“This is an exciting partnership between CDPH, UIC and Metopio,” said Will Snyder, co-founder and CEO of Metopio. “Our software is designed to break down data siloes and make powerful analytics available to a variety of stakeholders, regardless of their data science background, so they can uncover insights about populations and places they care about.”
At the 7th annual edition of the “Smart 50 Awards” in Denver on May 15, Smart Cities Connect will announce three overall winning projects out of the 50 total awardees.