I have moments when I ponder how Charlie Brown must have felt after Lucy yanked the football away… YET again. He had one goal… connect with that @#$%&! football.

But alas, he never achieved it, not even ONCE! Lucy raises his hopes and then dashes them time and time and time again. It kills me to type that fact, although you do have to hand it to Charles Schulz… the metaphor is brilliant.

I too have a goal. To create beautiful, clear, and compelling data visualizations of health and healthcare data that people will connect with to improve our healthcare system and health. But am I achieving that goal even a tiny bit? HELLO, is anybody out there? Are you looking at and using our work?

I’m happy to report that unlike poor Charlie Brown who NEVER achieves his goal of kicking that football, I DO see evidence that our work gets noticed and people use the data and information to learn something new, raise awareness about health and healthcare issues, and best of all, act. SCORE!!

Here’s a case in point. Robert Rotzin, MPH, HealthDataViz Consultant, was recently reading a review of the Brooklyn, NY restaurant Aunts et Uncles that specializes in plant-based meals, when he came upon the following tidbit in the review:

“The name Aunts et Uncles suggests a caretaking angle to the hospitality and the cooking. People eat plant-based diets for many reasons, but Black vegans often talk about their desire to reverse the negative health outcomes that a tangle of historical, economic, and other factors have brought to their community. In East Flatbush, for instance, the community district that Aunts et Uncles serves, obesity and hypertension rates are higher than in New York City as a whole, according to data from the city.”

Hold the presses! “According to data from the city” links to the NY City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DoHMH) interactive Community Health Profiles (CHP) – the same ones that the HDV team designed and helped to develop. This is VERY exciting (and the closest I will ever come to having anything I even had some small part in mentioned in the NYTimes).

CHP reports include information about the sociodemographic characteristics, health status, quality of life, health risk factors, and health resources that are relevant for most communities. The overall objective of CHPs is to provide basic descriptive information that can help identify specific health issues that may require additional study and to set priorities for addressing issues adversely impacting a communities’ health.

As is true for many communities, the NYC DoHMH was facing several challenges with their CHPs, including timely updates to the profiles, making them accessible to a wide-ranging audience, and encouraging engagement and interactive exploration of the data. Here is a quick review of what we created to help address these challenges.

• First, in collaboration with the NYCity DohMH Team, we categorized the data into logical topics that people can easily identify and explore. This helps get people directly to the information they are interested in without frustration or, worse, leaving the site before they see the data.
• Next, because all data analysis is about comparisons to understand and evaluate what we’re looking at, we created functionality for the viewer to select different comparison communities.Remember, if you haven’t answered the questions “compared with what” you haven’t answered the “so what” question (go back to the starting line).
• In addition to data displayed in charts, the pages include dynamic, plain language and easy to understand narratives about the selected topic (the data in blue changes based on the community the viewer selects).
• To encourage wide dissemination, we designed each page to be easily linked (like the NYTimes article does) and to print on a one-page PDF.

In the following example, I selected Flatbush where the restaurant is located as my community, and then I selected Health Outcomes and Chronic Conditions.

Upon navigating to the page below I selected a comparison community and selected “yes” on the option to display the community with the best results.

Now I can see and consider:

• Is my community higher or lower on key metrics like health outcomes and a healthy environment, compared to other communities — what are the issues that need attention?
• Who is performing the best? What is different about that community versus mine?

Next, I navigated to Housing and Neighborhood Conditions and Built Environment and the selections I had made on the previous view persisted. We included this functionality to reduce the amount of “friction” or clicks that a viewer must make as they explore the data. If I change my mind about my selections, I can easily make new ones directly on each view. To add visual interest, we used icons to represent some of the data being displayed.

Like millions of other Peanuts fans, I do imagine the joy I would have experienced if JUST ONCE poor Charlie Brown kicked that football.

​Perhaps because Charlie Brown never did kick the ball and because some great work never does see the light of day, I experience that much more professional joy when our work is seen and used. Here’s hoping that you too can experience this professional joy!