Exercises - PH 422: Applying Informatics to Community Health Assessment

In addition to a variety of learning activities, there are 3 instructor-evaluated activities associated with PH 422: (1) complete the individual exercise; (2) participate in a multi-learner conferencing exercise; and (3) complete and submit the assessment quiz. Each of these is explained below.

Learning Activities (Note: these ARE NOT to be submitted!)

A series of individual learning exercises for this module are provided below. Completing these exercises will familiarize you with the knowledge, skills and attitudes that relate to the competency expectation for this module that is described above. Note that learners are not required to submit written response for these learning exercises. Completing these exercises, however, will prepare you for components of this module that are assessed and scored.

  1. Review the basic content for PH 422, which is provided in several online resources:
  2. Describe problems and limitations of using mortality data as the primary source of information on community health problems. Do the same for using only morbidity data. What other data sources are necessary to illuminate community health problems in your community?
  3. Consider one public health issue that is of interest to you (e.g. child abuse, HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, domestic violence, alcoholism, breast-feeding, seat belt use, etc.) Provide an example of an indicator or a measure of that health problem at the individual level, at the community level, and at the policy level.
  4. What are the strengths and limitations of using data from sources such as IPLAN in community health assessments in terms of their ability to identify causality and their usefulness in tailoring local interventions?
  5. Go to the Behavioral Risk Factor Survey (BRFSS) web site and review the indicators or items in the survey:
    1. What level of assessment is being done here?
    2. What level of confidence would you have in these data if you were in a State Health Department? A Local Health department? A community based organization such as a health center (FQHC)? Explain.
  6. Go to the IDPH web site for the IL BRFSS and select a category of interest and describe the data from the indicators (in the frequency tables) for Chicago and compare with Illinois as a whole. Comment on utility of the data and public health implications.
  7. You are a newly hired employee of your local health department which is preparing for a meeting with the the major business leaders in your jurisdiction. Your director would like to provide data about health status and health problems to these business leaders and has asked you to compile this information from existing sources. You are familiar with the IPLAN data. You decide to review what is available from this source on your jurisdiction for use one for this meeting. What data and information would you most want to include?
  8. The Public Health Informatics article by Yasnoff and colleagues argues that the application of information science and technology can improve the public's health. After reviewing this article, described how your ability to conduct a community health assessment can be improved over the next 5 years by advances in public health informatics. Who should be responsible for implementing your ideas?

Evaluated Activities (Note: these ARE to be submitted!)

(1) Individual Exercise

Each learner will submit a brief response to the following exercise. Produce your response on a separate document to be uploaded at the "Submit Assignments" link. Please use "PH 422 Individual Exercises" as the title of your submission.

Go to the the IPLAN web site and examine health status data for one jurisdiction (county or municipality). Based on the data you find, what do think are the major health problems for your jurisdiction? What type of data (for example, mortality or morbidity data) did you use to come to your conclusion?

(2) Conferencing Exercise

Add your contributions to this multi-learner conferencing exercise after reviewing any available submissions by other learners. Produce your response on a separate document to be uploaded at the "Submit Assignments" link. Please use "PH 422 Conferencing Exercises" as the title of your submission.

You have been asked to review and improve a specific category of health indicators for the Illinois Department of Public Health. Go to the IPLAN web site and select one of seven indicator categories.

The categories are listed below and on the web site:

  1. Demographic and Socioeconomic Characteristics
  2. General Health and Access to Care
  3. Maternal and Child Health
  4. Chronic Disease
  5. Infectious Disease
  6. Environmental, Occupational and Injury Control
  7. Sentinel Events

Each of these categories has several indicators. Specify your chosen category and: (a) Identify a problem in measurement (accuracy and completeness) with at least one of the existing indicators; (b) Identify and justify three indicators you would add to this list; ( c) List limitations and /or measurement issues (accuracy and completeness) for each indicator you selected; and (d) How could some of these issues be overcome or dealt with effectively?

(3) Assessment Quiz

Follow the LearningSpace link to the Assessment Quiz. You may be asked for your login ID and password to access the quiz through your Preparedness Center Personal Page. Complete the quiz and submit your responses. You make take the quiz several times.

Course Evaluation: All learners are asked to electronically complete a Course Evaluation Questionnaire; this is available to you as an electronic form and will be transmitted to a data base without your identity being known, and your instructor will have no way to link your identity to your comments. Before participating in these course evaluation activities, students should review the specific learning objectives established for this course (and others you may have taken as part of this series); these are available in the Syllabus. Evaluation of the course should focus on the extent to which these objectives were achieved.

PH 422 Exercises last revised June 30, 2005 (dkapadia)