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Health

Saratoga County Launches Substance Use Surveillance Dashboard

Posted on February 10, 2023 by Christopher Gabris

Saratoga County officials have been determined to find a way to address and combat the opioid epidemic in Upstate New York. On February 7, 2023, the Saratoga County Department of Health launched a tool called the Substance Use Surveillance Dashboard to help enhance the county’s opioid education, prevention, treatment, and response efforts.

The near real-time resource consists of an easy-to-navigate dashboard that houses informative data for Saratoga County professionals in law enforcement, public health, and mental health, as well as community partners who focus on substance use support services.

From Vision to Reality: Building the Substance Use Surveillance Dashboard

Blue Raster worked with epidemiologists from the Saratoga County Department of Health to design and configure the dashboard. Through a series of learning sessions, our team took Saratoga County’s vision and visualization ideas and brought them to life. Built on the ArcGIS Platform, we utilized Python scripts to update the dashboard’s key metrics for overdoses—shown through various graphs, charts, and a map by zip code. The dashboard also displays a series of charts and tables illustrating the epidemic over the years and through demographic breakdowns.

The Powerful Impact of GIS

At Blue Raster, we introduce federal, state, and local government clients, as well as global organizations, to the power of maps and GIS products as a way to respond to some of the largest health issues we face today. Saratoga County’s Substance Use Surveillance Dashboard is now another resource for local officials across multiple departments to use to educate and prevent further opioid use, provide treatment, and respond to overdoses with real-time knowledge.

Explore the Dashboard

Read the Official Launch Press Release

“The opioid epidemic has devastated communities throughout the U.S. and like national and state trends, heroin and fentanyl continue to be key drivers of overdose deaths in Saratoga County. This dashboard will provide critical information for the County to implement effective strategies and initiatives to mitigate the effects of the opioid epidemic in our communities and the Health and Human Services Committee remains focused on supporting our county departments in these efforts.”

- Supervisor Phil Barrett (Clifton Park), Chair of the Saratoga County Board of Supervisors Health and Human Services Committee

*Source: https://www.saratogacountyny.gov/latest-news/

Modeling a Decision Support System in Response to COVID-19

Posted on March 2, 2022 by Chigo Ibeh

We are proud to work in partnership with the Space Enabled Research Group at the MIT Media Lab and East Carolina University in developing a decision support tool that can inform public policy in response to challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Vida Decision Support System is a customized online tool designed for use by public sector officials at the city and regional level who are making policies regarding public health, the economy, or environmental management. The Vida Decision Support System helps city and regional leaders understand the relationships between important societal factors. The tool is built on a framework that uses a series of models:

Environment
Socio-Economic Vulnerability
Public Policy and Decision-Making
Technology Design

Vida is based on an integrated Data Visualization and Modeling Framework created by the Space Enabled research group at MIT that combines multiple data sources and creates simulations of the current or potential future states of a city or region.

This tool is being developed in partnership with several government entities including Angola, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, and Mexico. The tool was developed using ArcGIS Dashboards. The “Analysis” tab includes an embedded data comparison tool developed in JavaScript.

Beyond COVID, this tool can be applied to any number of disruptions including drought and extreme weather events, as well as helping to meet sustainable development goals.

Automating Workflows for COVID-19 Response

Posted on October 25, 2021 by Piper Conrad

Saratoga County is one of the fastest growing counties in upstate New York. The Department of Public Health has a robust COVID-19 dashboard that keeps businesses, policy makers, schools, and the general population informed of the rate of cases and hospitalizations. Using a New York State Department of Health emergency funding Coronavirus Response grant, the county partnered with Blue Raster for support with automating workflows and deploying ArcGIS Enterprise.

The Blue Raster team worked with the Department of Health to automate their daily data publishing process through ArcGIS Notebooks. Notebooks are an efficient, modern environment that combine code, on-the-fly visualizations and maps, as well as data tools. In the notebook editor, you can write, document, and run Python code in one place. This helped with automating workflows reduced the time spent each day updating the dashboard.

Blue Raster is also supporting the installation and configuration of a base deployment of ArcGIS Enterprise to support the expanding use of ArcGIS. We’re here to serve any state and local organization looking to better utilize their data.

Public Health & GIS: HealthLandscape Addresses Today’s Public Health Challenges

Posted on August 26, 2021 by Angela Wertman

Modern Solutions for Addressing Today’s Public Health Challenges

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) aims to strengthen family physicians and the communities they care for through prevention and public health initiatives. As part of this effort, their innovation arm, HealthLandscape, develops geospatial data visualization to help the community find insights to improve health care.

Zeroing in on Community Health Demographics

Blue Raster has been working with the organization for over a decade, creating and modernizing GIS solutions. Recently, the team moved the Community Data Portal from Flash to Java Script.

Using this portal, health providers and public health officials can filter the data most important to their communities and their area of practice. The configurable tool enables users to explore demographic, education, income, and health disparities and can be configured for any geographic area. The tool can ingest datasets from sources like the U.S. Census Bureau, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Robert Wood Johnson County Health Rankings, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid…the possibilities are endless. Users can create side-by-side maps between indicators (for example, diabetes and poverty) to visualize potential relationships. Additionally, users can overlay infrastructure data such as interstate networks or locations of health facilities and start to visualize patterns between the two. Graphs and charts are available to see the numbers behind the data and reports can be automatically run off the filters. The solution uses Esri ArcGIS API for JavaScript, Node, React, and ArcGIS Enterprise and Portal for ArcGIS.

Public Health Tool: HealthLandscape Community Data Portal

Meeting the Demands of High Risk Populations

Similarly, Blue Raster developed the Local Needs Assessment application that helps identify high-risk areas based on social determinants of health (“cold spots”) and poor health outcomes (“hot spots”). Identifying and mapping these high-risk areas allows for targeted approaches. The solution allows users to explore relationships between these two and identify outliers by creating scatter plots. In addition, users can customize this solution to examine childhood health, geographic population health, mental health and more public health indicators.

Health organizations are developing innovative ways to harness the data integration and spatial visualization power of GIS.

GIS plays a critical role in determining where and when to intervene, improving the quality of care, increasing accessibility of service, finding more cost-effective delivery modes, and preserving patient confidentiality while satisfying the needs of the research community for data accessibility. Contact us today to learn more!

Esri Nonprofit Specialty: Enabling Nonprofits to Use GIS for Greater Impact

Posted on August 18, 2021 by Piper Conrad

Esri Nonprofit Specialty

Blue Raster is a proud member of the Esri Nonprofit Specialty. Partners receive this Nonprofit Specialty designation for their alignment with and their knowledge and expertise of Esri’s Nonprofit Organization Program. Additionally, we demonstrate experience with projects in many nonprofit industries: conservation, humanitarian, disaster response, food security, community development, racial equity and social justice, health research, and more.

The Esri Nonprofit Program provides nonprofit organizations low cost licenses and access to a Esri's vast offerings of location intelligence tools and training. We are proud to support a wide variety of nonprofit clients in using these location intelligence tools to help inform decisions and shape programs that meet the needs of their constituents. Receiving the Esri Nonprofit Specialty designation is an exciting next step in furthering our mission to help nonprofit and NGO clients achieve their goals.

Nonprofit Experience

Blue Raster has deep expertise developing platforms for managing and disseminating geospatial data and analysis to support conservation efforts with the Esri ArcGIS platform. Since our founding in 2002, we've had the honor of working with over 70 nonprofits and NGOs. For example, we work with leading nonprofit conservation organizations including the World Resources Institute, the Jane Goodall Institute, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Wildlife Conservation Society, NatureServe, National Audubon Society, Stimson Center, and more.

Blue Raster continues its commitment to bringing the latest in geospatial technologies to leading conservation, global development, humanitarian & disaster response, social justice, and health research & advocacy organizations.

“We look forward to expanding our work in the nonprofit sector as part of this Esri specialty,” commented Michael Lippmann, Principal/Founder of Blue Raster. “Our team thrives on helping organizations make connections between data to better communicate and power their impact.”

Are you a nonprofit looking to better utilize your data?

Nonprofit Specialty

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