Today, the City of Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) released 18 different sets of public health statistics, by community area or zip code.
The statistics cover a range of topics including birth rates, causes of death, environmental, chronic, and infectious diseases, and covers a span of over a decade of information.
"Increasing the availability of public health information is one of the strategies outlined in Healthy Chicago, our City's Public Health agenda that outlines 12 public health priorities that are all crossed in these data sets," said Dr. Bechara Choucair, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Although CDPH maintained this data, and made it available to the public, putting the datasets online as downloadable tables makes it easier to use and more readily available to those who are looking for it.
Now the data is more accessible to individuals and organizations as they design public health interventions and write grant applications, and also to further the work of researchers and students from academic institutions. This type of detail helps in allocating resources based on the needs of specific community areas or zip codes in some cases, and is useful to both city agencies, and community based organizations.
"This is a key vehicle in putting the resources where they are most needed and allows the City and other agencies to be more strategic and successful in implementing health programs," said Dr. Bechara Choucair.
Each dataset is accompanied by technical notes that provide detail about aspects of indicators and their calculation, including data sources, national baseline and target values, and limitations and sources of error that should be considered when making comparisons.
The categories and indicators allow for comparison to national benchmarks so it can be easily compared to national sets of data.
CDPH will add more data to the portal as it becomes available. The data are located on the City's Open data portal and can be accessed by
clicking here.
