'Yale Team Wants to Democratize Data With PopHIVE'

 Anne Zink, MD, and a team at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, set out to build the data dashboard Zink wished she'd had as Alaska's chief medical officer.

The result was PopHIVE, a platform that pulls data from many sources to give a national picture of infectious and chronic disease and, eventually, injury. It stands for Population Health Information Visual Explorer.

"I try to think of it as giving gifts to my former self -- what are the things I wish I had in that role?" Zink told MedPage Today. "What are the things that state public health leaders now need?"

The goal is to democratize data, putting information about disease at the fingertips of state and local public health officials and the public alike, Zink said.

COVID showed how difficult it was to access accurate and timely data, and over time that need was met with dashboards like the Johns Hopkins COVID tracker. It also prompted data modernization efforts at the CDC, which eventually brought disease trackers online for some conditions.

But those aren't always the easiest to find or use -- and as the recent government shutdown showed, may not always be available. CDC's influenza tracker, for instance, was last updated Sept. 20.

"We've been frustrated for years at just how hard it is to find the data that we need," Daniel Weinberger, PhD, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Yale and co-creator of PopHIVE, told MedPage Today. "It's often scattered in many different places if we can find it at all."

Discussions about PopHIVE started about a year ago, Weinberger said. It launched this summer but proved especially valuable during the shutdown.

"With the government shutdown, we're the only place really in the country that you can see the fact that RSV [respiratory syncytial virus] rates are picking up in the southeast right now," Zink said.

PopHIVE's data come from several sources, including many CDC projects, but it also pulls in Google Health trends data as well as information from EPIC Cosmos. EPIC is the largest electronic health record system in the U.S., and while not all of its users contribute to Cosmos, the database offers a very large national sample, Weinberger said.

PopHIVE also pulls in respiratory virus data from Delphi, a product of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"We bring together datasets that have previously been siloed, and we overlay them and compare them," Weinberger told MedPage Today. "You start to see patterns that you might not see otherwise."

For instance, when the team overlaid various RSV datasets, they had an unusual finding. Emergency department visits for RSV increased first, but Google searches and wastewater data increased at a later timepoint.

"Usually wastewater and searches are an early indicator, and we'd see something there first," Weinberger said. As they drilled down into the data, they saw that the early emergency department visits were driven by infants.

"Their epidemic peak is actually a month earlier than the epidemic peak in older adults," he told MedPage Today. "So the signal that we're seeing for Google searches and wastewater is picking up the epidemic in adults beautifully ... but it's completely missing the epidemic that's happening in babies a month earlier."

Megan Ranney, MD, MPH, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, said PopHIVE is funded through both foundation and individual philanthropic donations, and has no federal funding. The PopHIVE team is always looking to expand data sources and capabilities, she said.

Being in academia offers the advantage of trust for partnering with other organizations, she said. Yale has high integrity and strict data use agreements; data aren't sold or used for regulatory purposes, Ranney noted.

Eventually, PopHIVE will host dashboards on injury and overdose, as well as youth well-being -- and it is always looking to do more, Ranney said.

"We believe that folks deserve to know what health problems are in their communities," Ranney told MedPage Today. "If you can't measure it, you can't do anything about it."

Karen DeSalvo, MD, MSc, who was chief health officer of Google until August, cheered PopHIVE's incorporation of EPIC Cosmos and Google Health data into its dashboard during the American Public Health Association meeting last week.

"It's not meant as a replacement for CDC and some of those data sources, but I think it definitely is an exciting way to think about how we could have timely, actionable, granular data that's not 2 years stale," she said. "It's more reflective of the health of today's population and helps us do prediction into the future."

https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth/118459