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Public Health Dashboard Companion Document May 2018 2 | Page Q: What years are your data from? The data included in these dashboards are the most up to date data available for Orange County. In some cases, there may be more recent data available for peers, the state, or the US; however, benchmark values are selected from the same year as the Orange County data, for consistency of comparison. In some cases, data points from one geography may represent multiple year rates (such as 3‐year or 5‐year rates), whereas other geographies may show only 1‐year rates. In these cases, the smaller geography (counties) uses multiple years of data to improve statistical power through a larger sample size, whereas US numbers are large enough in a single year to report a 1‐year rate. Q: How do you determine which indicators to include in your dashboards? The over‐arching content areas selected for our dashboards are based on current county priority areas and on the topic area categories included in the Healthy People 2020 and Healthy North Carolina 2020 Objectives. In order to present a meaningful set of data that develops an executive level picture for what is happening in our county’s health, we only include indicators that meet several criteria. These criteria help contextualize county measures by relating them to comparable benchmarks. Meaning, a number by itself does not give you any frame of reference unless you have other measures to compare it with. We aim to select measures that are meaningful to public health and: 1) annual measures 2) updated on a regular basis 3) available at the county level 4) have existing objectives, targets, or benchmarks (such as the HP2020 or HNC2020 Objectives) 5) are commonly used measures across geographies (other counties, the state, the US) In some cases, an indicator may meet several but not all of these criteria. In general, an indicator must meet a majority of these criteria to be included in the dashboard. Q: What do the circle, triangle, and square icons mean? The performance icons serve as “at‐a‐glance” guides that allow the reader to scan the dashboard and identify indicators for which the county is performing either better or worse than the majority of available benchmarks (target, previous, peer, NC and US). It is important to note that these icons serve as a starting point for conversations, but there are many stories to tell behind each indicator. For example, an indicator with a green circle may not alert the reader to health disparities for a specific demographic group within an indicator data set. The absence of disparity measures is a general limitation of this indicator set, but the department hopes to incorporate more data related to health disparities in future dashboard iterations. Performing better than four or more benchmarks Performing better than two or three benchmarks Performing better than one or no benchmarks Benchmarks include Target, Previous, Peer, NC, and US