For five years, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, Anne Zink served as the chief medical officer for the state of Alaska. While leading the state's health response, she often wished for better real-time data - not only about rates of COVID-19 but also for other diseases like influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
"One thing that continued to just amaze me and frustrate me was the lack of information and data that I had to make decisions," said Zink, lecturer and senior fellow in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH).
So, when Zink joined YSPH in 2024, she and her colleagues decided to build the type of data platform that could have helped her while working for the state of Alaska. Called PopHIVE (Population Health Information and Visualization Exchange), the platform puts near real-time, reliable health data directly into the hands of the public.
"I was trying to give my former self the gift of data," said Zink, who now serves as PopHIVE's co-director.
A clearer picture
PopHIVE pulls data from a range of sources, including anonymized hospital records, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), national health surveys, anonymized search data, and more. By bringing together this health care and public health data, PopHIVE provides a more complete picture on population health trends for policymakers, journalists, health care providers, public health experts, and the general public.
"PopHIVE has become an important data resource for a variety of audiences, including state health departments and journalists," said Dan Weinberger, professor of epidemiology at YSPH and co-director of PopHIVE. "It has been exciting to bring together different complementary data sources that have not been directly compared before and try to understand where they differ and agree."
In general, public health data typically has been fragmented, inaccessible, and outdated. That sometimes has limited the ability of public health experts to get a clearer picture of, for example, a disease outbreak.
When it launched last July, PopHIVE's first dashboards showed local and national trends in respiratory illnesses, childhood immunizations, and chronic conditions. Now, the platform is building out new dashboards and data sets for topics such as maternal health, injuries and overdoses, and youth wellbeing, thanks to a $1.2 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
"We've always seen this platform as more than infectious diseases," Zink said. "If you look at, for example, leading causes of death amongst young people, it's injury and overdose."
The grant also supports new collaborations, including with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO). PopHIVE has also received philanthropic and grant support from the Common Health Coalition, Kaiser Permanente, the de Beaumont Foundation, and other sources.
Through this funding, PopHIVE has been able to keep its platform free and accessible for all. The datasets have been used to track local outbreaks and gain new insights into illnesses like RSV. Last October, for example, the Los Angeles Times cited PopHIVE data that showed an increase in emergency room visits for infants because of RSV; that data had been drawn from Epic Cosmos, which represents patient records from hundreds of hospitals and thousands of clinics.
PopHIVE provides information about health issues, over time and across populations and geographies. Using the data from different sources, users can observe patterns and compare trends. And when multiple sources align, users' confidence in the data builds; when sources differ, it can inspire important questions about methodologies.
