The City of Chicago successfully utilized big data for a public health outreach program, according to an article in Kaiser Health News.
The Chicago health department and Roseland Community Hospital teamed with Civis, a Chicago-based startup analytics firm created by former members of President Barack Obama's election team, to create better outreach for uninsured women in poor neighborhoods of Chicago that needed breast cancer testing.
They used census survey material to correlate gender, race and income data to insurance status. They then created algorithm that predicted where the uninsured clustered and that could find women in the appropriate age range. The final piece was sending out mailings for free screenings to the women. The mailings "generated quite a bit of buzz," according to a Roseland spokesperson interviewed by Kaiser Health News.
Utilization of public census data for preventative health effort was a technique recently applied by researchers at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. They were able to use housing and health data sets to determine which neighborhoods in the city were putting kids at risk for asthma attacks.
