City Health Dashboard

Posted by New York University on June 11, 2018

Health dashboard shows mixed results for Philadelphia

We already know that Philadelphia, the poorest big city in America, has been consistently ranked as Pennsylvania’s least-healthy city.

City Health Dashboard just updated its health tracking data for 500 of America’s largest cities, including Philadelphia, and the numbers still aren’t good — though it’s not all bad news.

The digital tool presents data on 36 health measures such as high blood pressure, excessive housing costs, violent crime and breath cancer deaths. The stats are presented on interactive maps, tables and charts that can compare data among cities, neighborhoods, key factors, race and gender.

A few alarming stats about Philadelphia:

• 31.3 percent of public school children are chronically absent, compared to an average of 17.1 percent across the 500 largest cities
• 60.5 percent live births receive adequate prenatal care, compared to an average of 78 percent
• There are 995.8 violent crimes per 100,000 people, compared to an average of 511.2
• Some pieces of good news: Only 22.3 percent of residents have limited access to healthy food — that is, live within a half-mile of a grocery store — compared to an average of 61.9 percent, and the city gets a walkability score of 79 out of 100, compared to an average of 42.8.

And one glaring misstep in the dashboard: It includes 2012-2014 data for opioid overdose deaths that states Philadelphia saw only two deaths per 100,000 residents. Compare that to 2016, when it saw 46 for the same amount. (The city reported in April that it calculated 1,217 unintentional drug overdoses in 2017.)

Explore the dashboard

https://www.cityhealthdashboard.com/pa/philadelphia/city-view

The dashboard was developed by the Department of Population Health at New York University’s School of Medicine and supported by the health- and healthcare-focused Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Other partners were NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, the National Resource Network, ICMA and the National League of Cities.

The goal of the the dashboard is to help local city leaders better understand citywide and neighborhood-wide crises, which can in turn help them come up with targeted solutions.

“With city and neighborhood-specific data, community leaders, city officials, and advocates now have a clearer picture of the biggest local challenges they face, and are better positioned to drive change,” said Abbey Cofsky, managing director for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in a press release.

By Ivanie Cedeño
From Generocity via United Way of GPSNJ