The Gwinnett County Department of Community Services has relaunched an online resource for residents, LiveHealthyGwinnettData.com, featuring real-time data and information to promote health and wellness communitywide.
The platform was built in partnership with Conduent’s Health Communities Institute, which provides management solutions to help communities progress toward health equity and whole-person wellness with cutting edge technology and data.
The website includes four key initiatives and resources to help residents enact positive changes in health habits:
- Be Active
- Eat Healthy
- Get Checked
- Be Positive
“The Community Health Dashboard has been a resource in the Gwinnett community for years, previously supported by our community hospital system,” said Lindsey Jorstad, CPRP, deputy department director of community services for Gwinnett County. “For service continuity and preservation of historical community data, Gwinnett County government worked for roughly eight months in collaboration with Conduent HCI to relaunch the platform as the Live Healthy Gwinnett Community Dashboard.”
Operational funding was allocated to provide the service, used by many county departments, community partners, individual residents, and community-based organizations throughout Gwinnett, Jorstad explained.
“Our goal is to help meet Live Healthy Gwinnett’s mission to encourage residents to Be Active, Eat Healthy, Get Checked and Be Positive. LiveHealthyGwinnettData.com helps bring awareness to community health challenges, areas in which future collaboration is necessary to improve health outcomes and to ultimately support our resident’s social wellbeing in a community where everyone thrives,” Jorstad said.
“Too often, community health data isn’t accessible to the people and organizations that need it most. The HCI Platform breaks through this barrier to bring key data to the community that’s always current and easy to understand,” said Jane Chai, MPH, community health content expert with Conduent HCI.
“We are very excited to work with the Gwinnett County government team to build Live Healthy Gwinnett as a resource for everyone. The website includes analytical tools and access to continuously updated community health and socioeconomic data that tells the community’s story,” Chai added.
Information and knowledge provide the power and motivation needed to enable progress.
“In our experience, broad access to important data and information about the health of a community is the catalyst people need to collaborate and communicate to build — and sustain — initiatives that can make a real difference,” she said. “Live Healthy Gwinnett is a great example of how communities can engage with the data, explore best practices to improve health, and track progress of programs that are designed to help residents across the county.”
Real-time data
“LiveHealthyGwinnettData.com is intended for anyone interested in community health and community health data,” Jorstad said. “It is our goal that residents look to this platform as a rich source of facts and information about their community. We want to make information about our community easily available and having the most up to date data coming in to one site from a variety of national, state and local sources does just that.”
The Live Healthy Gwinnett Community Dashboard allows visitors to see how their community compares to others in Gwinnett, the state and the nation.
Visitors to the site can “maneuver indicator topics such as race/ethnicity, age, gender and more, in addition to finding data by selecting their locale on the maps. This tool helps not only our strategic operations but those of our community partners and residents whose mission aligns with improving the health, safety and livability of Gwinnett,” Jorstad said.
Leveraging this site, Gwinnett residents and county leaders can compare and learn how their health benchmarks compare based on national goals, such as Healthy People 2030. Additionally, they can measure socioeconomic need that is correlated with poor health outcomes, evaluate food access correlated with economic and household hardship, and assess socioeconomic and health factors correlated with self-reported poor mental health, according to Jorstad.
The new platform will be linked from several health and community resources, and promoted via social media and email marketing to help continue to grow awareness of the new resource throughout the county.
“With over 250 indicators capturing demographic, education, environmental, economic, health, social determinant and equity data that highlights trends, challenges and opportunities in our community, anyone accessing the site can choose how they’d like to engage and comprehend the platform’s resources, tools and features,” Jorstad said.
Furthermore, the dashboard’s unique, dynamic functionality enables users to view hundreds of maps, tables, figures and promising practices, allowing users to create their own reports and downloaded features to embed in documents and presentations.
“This has been extremely helpful in past grant applications and award submissions,” Jorstad added.
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