NYC Health Dept. Launches Center for Population Health Data Science

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) established the Center for Population Health Data Science this week in an effort to improve the city’s public health data infrastructure.

The center’s work aims to effectively link and leverage healthcare, public health, and social service data.

“Data is much more than numbers on a page,” said Ashwin Vasan, MD, PhD, commissioner of the DOHMH, in the press release. “Data sounds alarms, spurs action, and drives planning, programs, and policy in health. It is our superpower in public health, and has quite literally, saved lives. We learned during COVID-19 that we must build on and accelerate our citywide public health data infrastructure, and this is the first step.”

The new center is part of a larger effort to create a citywide population health data system, which stakeholders hope will advance data modernization, health equity, and policymaking efforts.

The center will focus on communicable disease and outbreak response as part of New York City’s broader emergency preparedness and response readiness initiatives. Further, work at the center will also investigate how mental health and chronic conditions impact the health, well-being, and lifespan of the city’s diverse population.

As part of its work to develop a new public health data infrastructure, the center will focus on building and strengthening multiple strategic capabilities, including data visualization and communication; modeling and forecasting; matching and analysis of disparate data streams; data governance and privacy; and utilizing artificial intelligence in line with the “New York City Artificial Intelligence Action Plan.”

The center will also develop interoperability protocols to improve the sharing, matching, and use of various data sources to support the city’s population health goals.

“The big challenge is to turn our mountains of data into actual insights that catalyze improvements,” said Marc Gourevitch, MD, MPH, chair of the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Health. “Ambitious goals, like reversing the decline in life expectancy, require integration and analysis of data from diverse sources and sectors to pinpoint where new initiatives and investments will yield greatest impact. Building on the Department’s many strengths in this domain, the timely effort being announced today represents a significant step in charting the best course forward for health and health equity in New York City.”

Support for the Center for Population Health Data Science is partially provided by the Data Modernization Initiative (DMI), a federally funded program launched in 2019 and managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The center’s launch is the latest in a string of efforts at the local and state levels to improve public health.

In April, the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine established its Center for Health Equity and Precision Public Health to improve health outcomes in economically challenged, rural, and minority populations.

The center is designed to fill gaps in public health infrastructure revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, researchers in the center are working to combine precision medicine, genomics, population health, and health equity.

Stakeholders will work to link large amounts of clinical, genomic, and social determinants of health (SDOH) data, alongside other information, to provide a more holistic understanding of human health and healthcare across Virginia.