UHC Data Repository Measures Now Available on the New UHC Data Portal
uhc, November 22, 2022
The newly developed UHC Data Portal is an online tool to provide access to selected data from the UHC Data Repository. The UHC Data Repository includes data and calculated measures from various sources that the UHC Research and Data Core has obtained and cleaned. These data can be used in research and reports for academic publications and community organizations, as well as in educational/training settings. Data span a number of urban health categories including demographics, health outcomes, environmental hazards, social environments, built environments, and natural environments. From the home page, clicking on a category or on “Data” at the top of the page brings the user to a web page that sorts and displays datasets. This web page allows users to search for the data they need. Data can be filtered by tags (keywords) or by dataset formats.
UHC staff with expertise in urban health have compiled relevant data, including information on urban neighborhood environments, environmental exposures, health determinants, and health outcomes for the Philadelphia region and beyond. The data are readily available for use and provided in different formats such as SAS, CSV, Geodatabase (GDB) and shapefiles (SHP). Most measures have been aggregated to census tracts or ZIP code tabulation areas (ZCTA). In addition, users have access to codebooks and detailed methods documentation for each dataset.
Some initial data currently included on the UHC Data Portal:
- Demographic, housing, and socioeconomic measures from the US census and American Community Survey for multiple years (entire US)
- Impervious surface and tree cover (Philadelphia Metro Area)
- Air pollution (Philadelphia Metro Area)
- Weather (Philadelphia Metro Area)
- Crime (City of Philadelphia)
- Prevalence estimates of chronic disease, health behaviors, health care access and usage, mental health, quality of life (City of Philadelphia)
- Perceived safety and social cohesion (City of Philadelphia)
The UHC Research and Data Core is actively working to expand which data from the repository are available; reach out to UHCdata@drexel.edu with any specific requests. All available data will be updated as possible by the UHC Research and Data Core.