​"Democratization of Analysis: 

An Exercise in Accessing and Visualizing New York Health Data"

Policy Brief by the Step Two Policy Project

March 11, 2025

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Key Takeaways:​

1. There have been significant efforts in New York to make State-level healthcare data available to the public, especially through reporting in the health.data.ny.gov environment, which offers important information describing the data, robust visualization tools, and options for direct export and API connection.

2. Many topics of policy relevance are not available on health.data.ny.gov and are instead posted directly to agency-based webpages and managed with less standardization and clarity about relevant definitions, time frames, sources, update frequency, and other characteristics.

3. We thought it would be helpful to illustrate the types of resources that could be developed from the health delivery system data that is already publicly accessible but is not organized or presented in ways conducive to generating insights on public policy.

4. We selected a few topics as case studies: Medicaid managed long term care, Medicaid managed care, nursing homes, and the Essential Plan.

5. Putting together relevant datasets for ingestion, analysis, and visualization highlighted challenges related to: definitions and labels; formats and structure; and timeliness.

6. There are many opportunities to facilitate the democratization of health data and information:

   • Host more data on Health Data NY 

   • Publish data on additional topics of policy importance 

   • Produce dashboards and publish spreadsheet-friendly reports to facilitate interaction with the data 

   • Use more consistent structure and formatting conventions, standardized terminology, and shared demographic reference tables across health-related datasets

   • Provide return on reporting investment for organizations

   • Partner with stakeholders to streamline surveying and reporting efforts

7. We have included a detailed explanation of the methods we undertook for this project in the Appendix.

 

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