PHE6203 Public Health Informatics

Week 1 Project

Over the next four weeks, you will review and analyze a pre-intervention elementary school asthma database from a community that has four elementary schools. Each week, you will write a short paper describing the role of an informatician in regard to data capture and use within the Public Health Information Management Systems (PHIS) and Public Health Information Network (PHIN). You will explore the data elements, database technologies, analytics, and processes used by an informatician including data capture, scrubbing, coding, warehousing, managing, and reporting of public health information.
In Week 5, you will complete a comprehensive term paper and PowerPoint presentation that demonstrates a public health needs assessment using your primary asthma source data. Your paper and presentation should show why an asthma prevention intervention program is needed in the selected community and summarize how you came to your conclusions. The objective of this five-week project is for you to demonstrate the processes used in public health informatics through its application.
You will begin your course project by explaining how data is collected, scrubbed, coded, and stored within the PHIS. You will then explain how data is organized in databases, using the asthma data provided below. You will describe the data elements in the spreadsheet and the processes of an informatician by answering the questions below.
Click here to download the asthma data for 2013.
Note: Use this Excel spreadsheet throughout the course to complete your weekly data analyses and prepare your written assignments as they relate to public health informatics. Your weekly assignments will provide data to support your final term paper to be submitted in Week 5.
Based on the data in the spreadsheet, prepare a 3–4-page paper addressing the following questions:
Introduction: How is information collected, organized, scrubbed, coded, and entered into the PHIS?
Asthma Database Analyses:
Describe the structural organization of your database.
What is the survey population description?
Define pre-intervention
Define a database record. How many records are in your database?
Define a database field. How many fields are in your database?
Define a database field data definition (DD). What is an example in this database of a DD?
Based on the data collected, what is the purpose and potential use of this asthma survey data?
Summary: From the perspective of an informatician, discuss the asthma database’s key structural components, its organization, and potential uses.
Submission Details:

Give reasons and examples in support of your responses. Cite all sources using APA format
Submit a 3–4-page paper in a Microsoft Word document to the Submissions Area by the due date assigned.
Name your document SU_PHE6203_W1_A3_LastName_FirstInitial.doc

Week 2 Project

In Week 1, you analyzed a pre-intervention elementary school asthma database from the perspective of a public health informatician. This week, you will review the data set in more detail and discuss the tools informaticians use. For the asthma data summary, you will use your Excel Spreadsheet and Pivot Table reports. You will then answer the following questions in the form of a 3–4-page summary statement that includes the data as well as an interpretation of the findings. The Pivot Tables need to be embedded in your report to explain the summary results.
What summary results do your pivot tables demonstrate about this grade school population of students? Use the following questions to prepare your paper.
Data Frequency Questions:
Introduction:
Begin with an explanation of the tools of informatics, including spreadsheets, relational database technologies, and integrated statistical packages. Why are these tools and technologies so important when managing large databases of public health informatics?

Database Analyses

Are there more males or females in the survey population?
Which condition has the highest frequency?
Which month had the highest number of students with breathing difficulties?
Which school had the highest frequency of students with bronchitis?
Which gender has the highest frequency of asthma?
How many students answered yes to Reactive Airway Disease (RAD)?
What is the percentage of students with RAD that have been prescribed medication?
Which zip code has the highest number of students living in it?
Of that zip code, which condition had the highest frequency?
How many students answered yes to all four conditions: asthma, RAD, bronchitis, and wheezing?
Based on all four conditions and zip code, are the conditions evenly distributed among the survey population?
Does one school have more students in the affected zip codes and with all four conditions than the others do?
Summary:
Explain your data analyses results and describe what data quality assurances you applied to ensure your results are accurate.

Submission Details:

Give reasons and examples in support of your responses. Cite all sources using APA format.
Submit 3–4-page report in a Word document to the Submissions Area by the due date assigned.
Name your document SU_PHE6203_W2_A2_LastName_FirstInitial.doc.