BACKGROUND: The Florida Community Health Assessment Resource Tool Set (CHARTS) is a source for Florida health and population data that is accessible on an openly public website. The CHARTS website is popular with 11,903,012 hits and 282,668 visitors in 2015. It provides aggregate counts, rates, and statistics on various health topics such as communicable diseases, maternal and child health factors, chronic disease, injury and violence, and population characteristics. The Florida CHARTS program uses annual data and measures selected from the agencies responsible for collecting those data to generate nineteen county and state profile reports, each summarizing topics on county, minority, or population health using indicators chosen to best represent trends in health applicable to that population. Counties, researchers, and the public use these data as a measure of health to compare counties to one another, to the state, and understand the health status of specific populations. Measures regarding vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs) and enteric diseases are included in reports as a count and rate of a single disease or combined counts and rates of several diseases intended to represent an overall picture. However, the combined count and rate format didn’t provide the granularity to indicate which diseases were potentially problematic and allow for assessment of a more targeted approach for prevention activities.
METHODS: Florida epidemiologists collaborated and used federal performance measures as a guide to create a proposed list of changes that represent a clearer picture of disease incidence in the focused population of each report. The Florida Bureau of Epidemiology recommended changes to these measures that included separating the clustered VPD and enteric measures to show individual diseases in lieu of a single combined measure, and expanding the list of diseases shown to include additional VPDs and enteric diseases. Partnership with the Florida CHARTS program led to integrating those proposed changes into the county and state profile reports.
RESULTS: In May 2016, six reports were updated with fifty enteric disease measures and five reports were updated with sixty-seven VPD measures. Thirty-eight of the new measures were age-specific and three were specific to pregnant women or women of childbearing age.
CONCLUSIONS: The goal of these changes was to disseminate better information via the Florida CHARTS website. The prior reports lacked some diseases and the grouped measures were potentially misrepresentative of the disease category’s true incidence. The revised measures provide detailed and easy to understand data on Florida VPDs and enteric diseases.