Health Care That Works is a new site that uses everyone's favorite mapping technology, Google Maps, to map hospital locations and closures in New York and show how they adversely affect low-income and minority New Yorkers.

The site mashes up three types of data from 1985, 1995, and 2005: the locations of open, closed, and downsized New York City hospitals, the location and density of low-income residents, and the location and density of communities of color. When viewed together using the Google Maps API, you get a rich picture of income, race, and health disparities in New York over the last twenty years.

While this is one of many, many examples of these types of mash-ups, it's a well-executed one that successfully uses the technology at hand to help us better understand the issues at stake. For example, using the above maps we can look at central Brooklyn (the purple center in the first map) and see that the population of color hovers somewhere between 80% and 100%; the second map illustrates that almost all of the same area is living below 200% of the poverty level (while the site is unclear about why it uses 200%, I suspect it's a reaction to high housing and other costs in the New York area); finally, the maps show that, coinciding with the high population of color and low income level, few hospitals exist in the the same area. Two markers inform us that two nearby hospitals have closed since 1985.

With twelve impending hospital closures in New York, this data is crucial to New Yorkers' understanding of the health care crisis and a good example of how to successfully marry data, technology, and a social message.

Tags: healthcare, mashups

Emergent Democracy | Grassroots Activism
Joshua Levy's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati