Information for Change-Current Work

RI DataHUB
In 2006, the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) was awarded a federal grant to improve the management of drug use and violence prevention. The ultimate goal of this project is to create an integrated data system that will enhance the State’s capacity to plan and implement appropriate services addressing prevention of substance abuse, violence and other related behaviors. This integrated and coordinated youth‐focused data system will build the capacity of community and state agencies to plan and deliver appropriate services to youth in a timely manner. Linking individual child‐level data from RIDE, DOH, and DCYF (and eventually Family Court and MHRH), the DataHub will allow RIDE to achieve its project goals when completed in late 2010. The DataHub database and web portal are developed, housed, and maintained by The Providence Plan.

The visualization software (WEAVE) integrated into the web portal is in development by the Open Indicators Consortium (OIC), of which RIDE is a member. Under RIDE’s membership, ProvPlan participates in the development of the WEAVE software. DataHUB infrastructure has been developed to be extremely flexible and can be deployed to answer a far broader set of data queries and policy questions.

LISC Sustainable Communities Project
Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).  LISC has developed a Sustainable Communities initiative to evaluate and monitor the health of eleven U.S. communities.  LISC will be focusing on the five dimensions of Sustainable Communities—real estate investment, family income and wealth, economic activity, education, and healthy environments and behaviors.  Four of these communities are being analyzed in depth—Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Providence, and Minneapolis.  Select neighborhoods in both Providence and Woonsocket are being evaluated by ProvPlan with a set of measures for tracking and monitoring community trends for demographic, social, and economic conditions.  

Using Open-Source Technology to Enhance Post-Release Supervision Systems
The Providence Plan and The Urban Institute received funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to develop a geospatial application designed to help corrections, public safety, and social service agencies better supervise and assist returning prisoners. The Providence Plan has developed and implemented a Web-based tool that enables users to conduct specialized queries of the locations of released prisoners, map those results at the address level, and then overlay the results with additional spatially-enabled datasets, such as support services for former prisoners. The Urban Institute is overseeing the evaluation, process documentation, and dissemination activities. The two organizations have worked together for over 10 years on numerous projects, including the Institute’s Prisoner Reentry Mapping Network and National Neighborhood Indicator Partnership.

HEALTH GIS and Data Services
Under a five-year services contract that started in Spring 2009, ProvPlan is persuing a variety of projects for the Rhode Island Department of Health:

Website Content Improvements:
ProvPlan is creating a robust data transfer service for two databases at the Department of Health (HEALTH), one that contains lead compliance information and one that records contractor and inspector licenses. In addition to increasing reliability of the system that issues Housing Resource Commission (HRC) certificates, this will allow HEALTH to post more comprehensive home lead information on its website.
As part of this project, ProvPlan is building improved, easy-to-use interfaces for the HEALTH website. The public and other state agencies will be able to readily search the compliance and contractor/inspector license databases. Compliance search improvements will include a unified Lead Safe Certificate, High Risk Properties, Multiple Poisoning Properties, and 2nd Notice of Violation search with pass-through search to HRC for Certificates of Compliance. Contractor/Inspector search improvements will include search by municipality, last name, and license type. A basic mapping feature may be included.

Parcel-Based Compliance Analysis
Rhode Island’s Lead Hazard Mitigation Law is designed to protect children and pregnant women from the adverse health effects of exposure to lead-based paint, which is prevalent in homes built before 1978. Absentee landlords are required to make efforts to mitigate the risks of lead-based paint for their tenants, and must maintain certification of their compliance with this requirement. HEALTH and HRC currently have no way to determine how many absentee-landlord properties have no compliance history. Starting with a pilot analysis in Providence, ProvPlan is combining HEALTH and HRC databases with property records to uncover the number and location of non-owner-occupied properties that have no evidence of inspection or mitigation. This will help increase awareness of properties with potential lead health hazards and may lead to a safer stock of rental housing.

Improve Detection of Unhealthy Properties
ProvPlan recently completed a master address-to-parcel lookup table for all residential properties in Rhode Island. We are working with HEALTH to integrate this table into their database so that elevated blood lead cases can be traced to property rather than just address. This is important because the law specifies HEALTH intervention based on the number of lead cases on a property. Because most of the properties at issue are multi-family dwellings with several addresses, the method of tracking cases solely by address may be missing numerous properties with multiple lead cases. Uncovering these cases will provide HEALTH with many more opportunities for early intervention.

Healthy Housing Indicator
Using Census data on poverty, age of housing and presence of children along with HEALTH lead screening data, ProvPlan is performing a statewide tract-level analysis to determine areas with unhealthy housing and vulnerable populations. Preliminary results indicate that this is a statewide problem, but that there are some areas with particularly high concentrations of unhealthy housing. Two legend scales will be used to track the issue, both on a statewide basis and separately for the state’s urban core. This work will be used to prioritize interventions and guide a more detailed parcel-based analysis.

Home Locator Work
HomeLocatorRI.net is a website maintained by Rhode Island Housing, a public agency that works to provide affordable and healthy housing opportunities. The site allows landlords to list their available properties free of charge. Unlike other free online classified services, HomeLocator provides landlords with informational resources about fair housing laws and affordable housing programs. For renters, a key advantage is that the site’s listings include information on lead abatement. This information is currently provided by landlords without verification. ProvPlan is working to determine the accuracy level of this data by linking HRC and HEALTH compliance data to properties by address. If accuracy is found to be poor, we will design a plan to create an automatic compliance verification linkage between HomeLocator and HRC/HEALTH web databases.

Tobacco Mapping
The Rhode Island Tobacco Control Network, along with HEALTH, seeks to educate Rhode Islanders about tobacco use in the state as well as advocate for policy changes to eliminate tobacco-related health disparities. There is concern that certain minority populations are more aggressively targeted for tobacco use through advertising and tobacco product availability.  At the request of the Tobacco Control Program, ProvPlan has compiled maps and completed data analyses which have provided information on different communities to display the disparities. The data and maps are being presented by local partners throughout the targeted communities. One map example can be found here.

Initiative for Healthy Weight
For the next three years, HEALTH will track ten Rhode Island cities and towns using the CDC’s 24 Recommended Community Strategies and Measurements to Prevent Obesity. Among the goals of this effort is curbing childhood obesity. ProvPlan is working to compile data and provide analysis to track progress in this effort. Along with HEALTH, we are also providing data and technical support to the Communities Supporting Healthy Lifestyles project. Olneyville Housing Corp recently became the first beneficiary of technical assistance, funding and other support under this potentially multi-year, multi-city project.

Airport Study
This project involves using hospital data to determine whether emergency respiratory and cardiovascular episodes are more frequent in times of elevated ultra fine particulate (UFP) air pollution. The project looks at individuals living and attending schools in Warwick, RI. Of particular interest are those in areas near the airport, as jet engines are a known source of UFP pollution. ProvPlan has partnered with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and researchers at Brown University on this effort.

Physician Report Card
Rhode Island’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Act stipulates that children in a specific age range shall be screened for blood lead annually. Physician’s offices are required to report screening results to the state Department of Health (HEALTH). ProvPlan is working with HEALTH to increase the reporting rate for this data. We are creating a system that will allow HEALTH to automatically generate a compliance “report card” that can be sent to physicians’ practices, hopefully resulting in better reporting and an increase in the number of children receiving the lead screening.

 

AHEC Physician Mapping Project
Working with the Rhode Island Area Health Education Center, ProvPlan has compiled the first comprehensive list of all health care providers and facilities in the state. We have mapped their locations and analyzed this against various measures of social need, including income, population density, access to public transit and non-English speaking populations. The findings will prove beneficial to municipalities, health care providers and advocates in targeting efforts to expand health services toward areas with the greatest need.  Maps can be accessed here.

Providence Police CompStat Support
Since autumn 2003, ProvPlan has been performing weekly crime mapping and statistical analysis for the Providence Police Department to support their internal CompStat accountability and strategic response program. We also provide the Department with specialized analysis around particular issues such as after-school crime, incident “hot spot” identification, and sex offender mapping.

Weed & Seed
In partnership with the Providence Police and the Weed & Seed Coordinator, ProvPlan provides crime analysis and mapping, indicator tracking, and website development services.

Past Work...

Questions regarding information projects should be addressed to Jim Lucht.