Injury Health Atlas of New Hampshire:  New Reports

The Department of Health are piloting a new interactive and dynamic way of presenting county health data for the State.  The presentation of statistics should be more flexible and encourage a more active exploration of themes.

This page showcases injury data for New Hampshire residents between 2000 and 2004, including county-level statistics derived from inpatient hospital discharge, emergency department, and death data.

With these reports, different forms of table, chart and map formats are rolled into a single report.  Data on a range of health indicators can be accessed in either single or double map displays combined with  tables, time-series, bar charts and scatter plots.  When the mouse is moved over each element, all graphic objects are "activated".  In this way, the user can explore not only the data values of a selected indicator, but also its spatial distribution, statistical attributes, rankings and other data relationships.

One or more counties can be selected at a time.  In the Double Map display, looking at two indicators side by side encourages exploration of  common factors between different data.

The plan is later to incorporate textual commentaries to aid the user experience.

Initially, two template formats are presented:

A state map with table,  time-series and bar charts

Two state maps with table and scatter plot.

Hospital data includes discharges of New Hampshire residents from Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine hospitals between 2000 and 2004.  However, data is missing for Massachusetts hospitals for the last 3 months of 2004 resulting in a loss of 2 percent of total 2004 data.  This data quality issue results in somewhat lower rates for 2004, especially in Southern New Hampshire.

Inpatient and Emergency Department Acute Care Hospital Discharge data is collected under New Hampshire statute RSA 126:25 that requires all NH facilities to report discharge data to the NH Department of Health and Human Services. Records of discharges of NH residents that occurred in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine are obtained by the Department through special interstate data exchange agreements with the agencies in those states responsible for collection of discharge data. Those agencies are the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy, the Maine Health Data Organization, and the Vermont Department of Banking, Insurance, Securities and Health Care Administration.