A couple of months ago, I talked to you about data and what it tells us about our country’s changing population. Today, I want to talk about data again, but through a different lens.

During the pandemic, so many of us working in public health have been glued to data dashboards. We watch COVID-19 cases rise and fall, positivity rates fluctuate, and, more recently (and thankfully), vaccination numbers climb. Data has been critical in helping us understand where we are with this virus. With the recent spread of the Delta variant, these numbers have helped us identify places with high transmission rates where people need to take extra precautions.

This laser focus on the numbers has also brought important data conversations to the forefront. We’re talking about the importance of data disaggregation by race, ethnicity, and social and economic factors like never before. We’re rethinking how we measure progress and collect data altogether. As part of this shift, I’m honored to serve on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s National Commission to Transform Public Health Data Systems, where we’re talking about what data is needed, how the data is shared, and how to make it more accessible to communities.

In light of this renewed interest, there are two important pieces of our data infrastructure that we need to reexamine if we want to make our public health systems be more equitable: who should be involved in collecting data and what we should be measuring. Let me explain.

First off: I’m a firm believer that local communities should have a say in what data we collect and how we interpret what that data means. Yes, data scientists and statisticians are important. But to make sure that we’re really capturing the entire picture of health in a community we need to engage the community itself. This can take many shapes, from local data councils that help shape how cities collect and interpret data, to targeted outreach to people who are too often underrepresented in samples. We need communities to have a voice in what types of data would help them make decisions and take action.

A few years ago, city leaders in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.—a diverse city just east of Los Angeles—prioritized outreach for a Quality of Life Survey to traditionally underrepresented groups. And in San Antonio, Texas, the city “gamified” a health survey for children and families by administering it through a museum exhibit. Both cities show the power of meeting community members where they are. These strategies can yield a more accurate picture of where a community is and what information can help them plan. But beyond that, they also highlight the importance of having precise and meaningful data to strategize and anticipate what communities need.

Secondly, when it comes to public health data, we need to rethink what we’re measuring. For so long, metrics like income levels and BMI have driven how we define a healthy community. Yes, these numbers reveal important pieces of the story. But that’s it: they’re parts of a much larger whole. We should also consider these other metrics:

• Social position is a metric that has been described in many ways: “perception of one’s social standing” or “the position that one occupies in the social structure, recognizing its stratified nature along social group lines.” Measuring social position can give us an idea of how people, particularly youth, value themselves and how they perceive others value them.
• Well-being, which encompasses physical, social, and mental health, and one’s sense of hopefulness, is another metric that we can use to understand the health of our communities more holistically.

For us to be able to use data optimally, we need to humanize it. That means, quite literally, going beyond the numbers. Data hold the power to transform communities—we just need to make sure that equity is fueling that change.

Cariños,
Margarita