BACKGROUND: The Cook County Department of Public Health (CCDPH) implemented a web-based data portal to meet the goal of data sharing. Although Cook County agencies and its departments are under the Open Government Plan, CCDPH aims to set the trend to promote data accessibility and responsiveness. CCDPH started the process of placing public health data into the data portal that is available to the public online and can be retrieved, sorted, searched, and downloaded. This process aims to provide the end-user of the data greater accessibility and usability of health data, in contrast to the previous static forms of tables and PDFs.
METHODS: In order to place public health data on the CCDPH data portal, we had to transform past data analyses from a static template into a format based on column headings and row entries. We began with commonly requested vital statics: birth and death data from years 2000-2014. The Cook County Bureau of Technology (BOT) assisted us to translate our data into the proper format, developing a coding script to search the data from the template and reformatted into a layout with a single column heading. The coding script was not without errors, to which we had to manually clean missing data and reformat before uploading the final product to the portal.
RESULTS: There were many challenges in the data transformation, but we expect the data portal will increase efficiency in data sharing for those internally at CCDPH and the general public requesting data due to the centralized location of data on the web. The newly formatted data allows for easier search and filtering capabilities. The Socrata engine of the portal provides users the ability to visualize data in charts, graphs, and maps. These options enhance user experience and turnaround time for common data requests. In light of these benefits, other data sets will be uploaded to the data portal.
CONCLUSIONS: The following lessons learned from the process of preparing the data into the data portal:
- Detailed planning and clearly-defined goals for the end user must be clearly stated and agreed upon before starting the process
- Rather than transforming previously analyzed data in template form into commonly used and searchable row and heading presentation, reanalysis and export into the presentation would be more efficient.
- Using a small subset of data would have been easier to manipulate than transforming the entire birth and death data.