Data to help match health-related services to community needs

What we’re doing: The Ontario Community Health Profiles Partnership makes high-quality, area-specific, health-related data available to everyone. We do this through our open-access website and free health maps as well as partnerships with health-care and social-service organizations.

Open-access website: The free data, maps and tables at www.OntarioHealthProfiles.ca can help you explore and compare different communities’:

• Health issues such as chronic disease (e.g. diabetes, high blood pressure), injuries, premature mortality, addictions and cancer
• Use of health-care services such as cancer screening, primary care, community health centres, hospitals, emergency departments and palliative care
• Demographic makeup such as language, immigration status, income level, sex and age
• Locations and densities of health-related resources such as grocery stores, schools and parks

Partnerships: Through regularly-updated, custom datasets, our expert spatial analysts help partners and new clients conduct research, set goals, measure progress and better understand and predict trends in their catchment areas. For example, our analysts can:

• Capture and layer sociodemographic factors and patterns such as the movement of people or rates of disease stratified by income, sex and age
• Identify areas where the distribution of services may not match needs or indicators of geographic accessibility
• Calculate distances and travel times, for example from patients and populations to services
• Contextualize your data, creating opportunities for new insights or avenues of exploration

Our long-term partners and current clients include health-care planners, hospital administrators, health agencies and scientists.

Why we’re doing it: A strong health and social service system matches community resources to community needs. Our goal is to help communities, service providers and policy makers identify issues related to health equity and respond to gaps in services.

How we’re doing it: We have outstanding data partnerships and a staff of expert analysts. Most of our health data comes from population-based health surveys, de-identified patient records, and clinical and administrative databases housed at ICES (an independent, not-for-profit research institute funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care). Other data partners include Toronto Public Health, community health providers and independent researchers.

To learn more about OCHPP and becoming a client or partner, please contact Anne-Marie Tynan at TynanMA@smh.ca. We look forward to hearing from you!