Currently, I am working with Unidos por la Salud (Unidos) to create an Asset Mapping System. Unidos’ mission is to advance the cause of Latino health and form strategic partnerships within the community. Unidos serves all of Colorado, with an emphasis on potentially underserved, rural counties.
The idea of an Asset Mapping System (AMS) is to create a resource for community leaders to turn to when they are looking for health data, resources, facility locations or demographic information.
The available information on the AMS is divided into two main categories; Services, and Data. The services are point datasets of resources local to Colorado, and thus far include Health Clinics, Pharmacies, and Hospitals. The ‘Data’ heading includes information from the latest Census and American Community survey datasets, as well as age-adjusted datasets from the Center for Disease Control.
For a quick technical tour, all of the data is currently housed in a MySQL database. Data is retrieved using AJAX calls to the server. The data is then reassembled by Javascript, and displayed via the Google Maps API. The menu and the sleek legend container are JQuery components created by Matteo Bicocchi. The iconography is part of a fantastic set of Google Markers created by Nicolas Mollet.
Current improvements in the works include increasing the depth of the Census data down to the Block level, as well as adding a number of new health datasets. Greatly aiding in this task is the recent discovery of the Health Indicator Warehouse API, which should make adding new datasets a snap.
If you haven’t already, check out the mapping site. For a fullscreen view without the map container, go here.
