Abstract
Public health practitioners need quick and easy access to reliable surveillance data to monitor states’ progress over time, compare benchmarks nationally or among states, and make strategic decisions about priorities and resources. Data, Trends, and Maps (DTM) at https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/data-trends-maps/index.html is a free, online interactive database that houses and displays data on nutrition, physical activity, breastfeeding, and obesity that practitioners can use for public health action. Created in 2015 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, DTM was updated and relaunched in April 2017 with the capability to customize and download data sets directly; DTM also has other user-friendly features, such as visualization options. Since its relaunch, DTM has received more than 386,000 page views from approximately 110,000 unique visitors. However, the potential exists for more widespread use of DTM if more public health practitioners understood what the site offered and how others have used it in the field. Here, we explain how public health practitioners can explore the most recent state-level data on nutrition, physical activity, breastfeeding, and obesity and use this data to inform programmatic and policy efforts to prevent and control chronic diseases. We demonstrate 3 different ways practitioners can visualize data (ie, Explore by Location, Explore by Topic, and the Open Data Portal) and present 3 real-world examples to highlight DTM’s utility as a public health tool.
Highlights
Other indicators describe state-level environmental or policy supports for healthy eating, active living, and obesity prevention, such as the presence of a Complete Streets policy and whether child care regulations meet national standards for avoiding sugar. The combination of both behavioral and policy or environmental indicators gives public health practitioners and other DTM users a context for understanding the multifactorial nature of chronic diseases
Using state and national data from DTM, the branch highlighted the lack of physical activity supports for North Carolinians, including that the state ranks 47th in the nation for the percent of adults living within one-half mile of a park (13.5%), compared with the national estimate of 37.3%
There is a natural delay between when data are collected by Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and other surveillance systems, when they are publicly available for analysis, and when they are added to DTM, but we try to minimize delays by analyzing and updating the database 3–4 times per year
Summary
Suggested citation for this article: Lange SJ, Moore LV, Galuska DA. Data for Decision-Making: Exploring the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity’s Data, Trends, and Maps.
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