Cleveland is a city on a Great Lake and soon it will be home to another lake: a lake of data to help inform policy and decision making to improve health outcomes in Northeast Ohio. The Cleveland-based Center for Health Affairs is collaborating with Amazon Web Services on a first-of-its-kind Social Determinants of Health Innovation Hub. It will create a large pool of data known as a data lake. The data will be used to address issues impacting the health of Northeast Ohio.
The goal of the innovation hub is to use data-informed solutions to address structural racism and poverty that the Center says are the root causes of non-medical factors which have enormous impact on health. These are known as social determinants and include such issues as housing, education and environment.
According to the United States Census Bureau, Cleveland has the highest poverty rate among large cities. The expectation is that the hub will help locally but also impact areas outside Cleveland too.
We will discuss the creation of the Social Determinants Innovation Hub with representatives from The Center for Health Affairs to begin Tuesday’s “Sound of Ideas.”
Later in the hour, we’ll bring you another installment of our “Get to NEO a Leader” series. In each installment, we talk to mayors and city managers from across our 22-county coverage area to get to know them and their communities better.
We began the series last March. IPM now provides news coverage to an area stretching across Northeast Ohio from Ashtabula and Trumbull in the east to Erie and Huron to the west and Wayne and Tuscarawas to the south. It’s a mix of urban and rural areas. The goal is to connect and inform everyone living in the region.
This week we talk to Orange Village Mayor Kathy Mulcahy.
Guests:
-Brian Lane, President & CEO, Center for Health Affairs
-Kim Byas, Ph.D., Social Determinants of Health Leader, Center for Health Affairs
-Kathy Mulcahy, Mayor, Orange Village