Voinovich School partners with Health Policy Institute of Ohio to release Health Value Dashboard

Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs recently teamed up with the Health Policy Institute of Ohio (HPIO) to release the 2019 Health Value Dashboard. The Dashboard tracks Ohio’s health metrics and ranks the state and how it can improve.

This is the third Health Value Dashboard that HPIO has released, and the Voinovich School was also involved with the previous two iterations, released in 2014 and 2017. This year, Voinovich School professor Dr. Ani Ruhil and research associate Natalie Wilson worked on the project.

“What you don’t know is of no use to you,” Ruhil said. “That is why dashboards suchas these are incredibly helpful for helping a state understand where its population’s health stands, and if the story is a dismal one, understanding some likely root causes for this state of affairs. What are other states doing well that seems to yield high rankings?”

“Dashboards matter in every policy arena, in every sector, and HPIO is to be commended on putting in tremendous effort to build and update the Health Value Dashboard every two years.”

The Voinovich School team worked with HPIO’s Health Measurement Advisory Group, who helped inform the metric selection, layout and methodology of the project. The Voinovich School was then responsible for gathering and ranking the data, which comes from a variety of public sources including the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many other organizations. The data compilation and analysis process, the main component of the project for Voinovich School researchers, started in June 2018 and was completed in March 2019, but the Health Measurement Advisory Group began working on the project before June.

The Dashboard is a composite of 130 metrics to measure health value across the state, including health behaviors, conditions and diseases, and health care service spending by area. Ruhil and Wilson gathered data in each metric from the past three years for every state and Washington, D.C. Although the Dashboard is Ohio-focused, the rankings include every other state, so the Dashboard could be helpful outside of Ohio as well, Wilson said.

“The purpose of the Dashboard to inform health policy, so we hope that it will influence better health outcomes among Ohioans based on what the data says,” Wilson said. “It compiles data from many sources, and puts it in a format that is easily digestible to policy makers and to other stakeholders, so we hope they can use that to find the areas of population health and health spending where Ohio could improve.”

According to the Dashboard results, Ohio ranks 46th out of 50 states and D.C., meaning Ohioans are overall less healthy and spend less on health than those in
other states. Ohio lands in the top quartile on just 5% of the metrics ranked, but in the bottom quartile on almost 30%.

“While Ohio continues to rank in the bottom quartile on health value, there are many evidence-informed opportunities we can pursue to improve these outcomes, both through policy change and public-private sector collaboration,” HPIO President Amy Rohling McGee said in a statement. “Improvement is possible, and we all have roles to play to achieve better results.”

The Health Value Dashboard is a broad-reaching health project for the Voinovich School, Wilson said. By compiling all of the data in the dashboard, the Voinovich School was able to help create an ongoing resource.“

The school works on number of other health initiatives, and HPIO and the Health Value Dashboard will likely be used to inform that research in the future,” Wilson said. See the full 2019 Health Value Dashboard here.