Recognizing the barriers many physicians – and policymakers – face to obtaining quality data, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) has added more data tools on maternal and infant health to its ongoing Texas Health Data project, in the form of online dashboards.
Texas Health Data compiles public health information, including, among other topics, vaccines, injuries, environmental health, and drugs and alcohol.
The new dashboards include information on maternal mortality, infant mortality, and pregnancy risk factors, data which was previously available only in an annual report, the “Healthy Texas Mothers and Babies Databook.” The dashboards will soon expand to include data on birth demographics, infant health practices, prenatal and postpartum care, and severe maternal morbidity, DSHS says.
“These data we collect are not always easily accessible for other health care professionals across the state,” DSHS Commissioner Jennifer Shuford, MD, told Texas Medicine Today. “This might [include] people who are very involved with health policy and research. And this lack of access to good data that DSHS has can limit their ability to make good policy and programs.”
The online dashboards open new opportunities for physicians and public health officials to use that data in public speaking, research, and other aspects of their work, Dr. Shuford says.
“These dashboards are configured in such a way so that there are buttons that you can push if you want to download the information as a PowerPoint slide, a CSV [spreadsheet] file, as an image, or as a pdf,” she said. “People can take this data, these graphs, these maps, and immediately insert them into presentations.”
The 10 dashboards that make up Texas Health Data sprang from the agency’s experience with publishing data rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Shuford says. The agency for the first time had to use provisional – or preliminary – data to inform the public about the spread of COVID-19. Similarly, the agency’s current dashboards on fentanyl trends and respiratory virus surveillance use provisional data to keep the public informed.
“These are brand-new dashboards that use provisional, up-to-date data for more real-time information about what’s happening in our communities,” she said.
DSHS plans to continue adding new dashboards to the Texas Health Data website to help with public health decision-making at the regional or county level, Dr. Shuford says. The next scheduled dashboards will address the state’s high rates of syphilis and congenital syphilis.
DSHS welcomes physician input to make these and other dashboards user-friendly, she says. “If there’s something that’s just not working or if there are data sets that people think should be prioritized, we are happy to hear about that.”