July 30, 2025

Health departments across the country are using a shared data platform to drive smarter decisions and more equitable outcomes. At a recent webinar hosted by the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC) and the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative, public health leaders from Long Beach, San Antonio, Philadelphia, and Mecklenburg County shared how they’re turning BCHC’s data platform into a powerful tool to build equity dashboards, fulfill data requests, and inform the policies that shape city health.

Through a dynamic partnership with the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC), the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) manages and updates the BCHC’s data platform and provides ongoing maintenance of the data platform (BigCitiesHealthData.org). The platform currently includes more than 200,000 data points for over 125 metrics for the 35 member cities of the BCHC. In 2025, Nashville, TN joined BCHC and their data were recently added to the platform. 

The UHC and BCHC recently hosted a webinar to hear how local health departments are using the data platform to support their work.

View The Webinar Recording

 "The platform allows us to see health trends for our city against other cities,” said Susan Long-Marin, DVM, MPH, Epidemiology Manager at Mecklenburg County Public Health. “This is useful because it puts our health department numbers into the context of what's happening in big cities across the country." 

Participants noted that – compared to other data platforms – Big Cities Health Inventory data are updated annually and includes many more metrics that are critical to urban health. “I love that I can quickly grab information for San Antonio and comparison cities for a presentation or workgroup,” said Katherine Hathaway, MS, MPH, Statistician at the City of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District.  “There’s a ton of info from lots of different data sources and it's all in one place.” 

In addition to ease of retrieving data, participants said the platform includes useful metrics that their department doesn’t routinely compile, such as age-adjusted, site-specific cancer death rates, and environmental metrics like walkability and heat waves.

Shiraya Thompson, MS, Data Analyst at the City of Long Beach Department of Health & Human Services described how Long Beach is using BCHC’s data platform to power their public-facing, interactive racial and health equity data hub. "For our health department and community partners to be able to effectively design equitable interventions and reduce health disparities, we need data disaggregated by race and ethnicity at the city level for each priority area of our community health improvement plan. Rather than making ongoing data requests to our epi team, we solved this by adding data from BCHC’s platform to our data hub.” She described using the data for many purposes, including for the department’s community health assessment reports and state of public health report. 

In addition to hearing from individual jurisdictions on their use of the platform, Amy Auchincloss, PhD, UHC PI for the data platform, and Elizabeth Green, PhD, Communications Director for the BCHC, showed examples of how health departments can share platform data with their stakeholders. This included downloading data, sharing weblinks to prepopulated charts, as well as adding platform functionality to health department webpages (via a widget that directly queries the data platform). All these functions enable even greater use and dissemination of data that can inform policy and action at the local level.

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The Big Cities Health Inventory data platform is primarily supported by Cooperative Agreement Number NU38PW000033 awarded to Big Cities Health Coalition and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Department of Health and Human Services.