Articles by

Andy Krackov

  • Article

    Positive solutions to local health problems

    Published January 17, 2014 by

    Solutions Journalism Network from Knight Foundation on Vimeo. Andy Krackov is senior program officer for the California HealthCare Foundation’s Market and Policy Monitor program. Below, he writes about Knight News Challenge: Health and the companion prize awarded by the California HealthCare Foundation this week.  In Riverside County, east of Los Angeles – where the Knight News Challenge winners were announced – nearly half of children ages 2-17 eat fast food two or more times in a given week, according to survey data. That’s 10 percentage points higher than the statewide average, and more than in neighboring counties.   In fact, in some Riverside County cities, like Coachella and Indio, more than 4 in 10 fifth-, seventh- and ninth-graders are obese or overweight. Most local elected officials struggle to obtain meaningful data about a range of health problems. Finding, analyzing, and visualizing data takes time and expertise. And then there’s the work of researching who else is addressing the problem and how their approach is working out. At California HealthCare Foundation, we weren’t aware, for example, of a central database that catalogs successful, local responses to wide-ranging health problems. What we did know, from conversations with county supervisors, is that finding evidence-based solutions to these types of health problems remains a priority.
  • Article

    It takes a community to humanize health data

    Published September 6, 2013 by

    Andy Krackov is senior program officer for the Market and Policy Monitor program of the California HealthCare Foundation, one of the collaborators for Knight News Challenge: Health. Photo credit: Flickr user Ian Freimuth. One of the best ways to understand how local data can be put to use is to attend a community meeting. This week I have the pleasure of joining John Bracken, Raina Kumra and others from Knight Foundation for the California gatherings to support News Challenge: Health. The events, attended by providers, policymakers and journalists, among others, have affirmed what communities can offer when they come together to talk. In San Diego the discussion turned on a question raised by one participant: Can behaviors that can negatively impact a community’s health—e.g., poor nutrition or smoking—be improved simply by disseminating data? RELATED LINKS  "40 ideas advance in News Challenge: Health" "What's next in Knight News Challenge: Health" by Chris Sopher "Bring your best ideas; deadline nears for News Challenge: Health" by Chris Sopher "Knight News Challenge on Health opens for entries" "Knight News Challenge: Health opens with inspiration phase, additional prizes from collaborators" by Raina Kumra and John Bracken "Announcing key collaborators and details of Knight News Challenge: Health" by John Bracken and Chris Barr "Join us to brainstorm ideas around News Challenge: Health" by Chris Sopher   "There's still time to brainstorm around News Challenge: Heath" by Chris Sopher "Data: Why we care" by Esther Dyson "Data provides a focus for community action" by Bryan Sivak "News Challenge: Make APIs not apps, health CEO says" by Lucky Gunasekara "How data-driven solutions can transform health" by Lexie Komisar "Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announces new prize for News Challenge: Health" by Paul Tarini "California HealthCare Foundation: The data stops here" by Andy Krackov "Data essential to promoting healthy habits" by Nirav R. Shah "Media company harnesses health data for stories that connect with communities" by David Kansas "Pizza tracker versus patient tracker" by M. Bridget Duffy To make health data hit home, one participant chimed in, you need to localize the facts. She went on to describe how a San Diego-area school district successfully fought childhood obesity first by presenting school-specific results to make data relevant and then providing related action strategies that parents, teachers and others can take. Nick Macchione, director of the county’s Health and Human Services Agency, aptly described this work as humanizing data. Up the coast in Long Beach, meeting participants picked up the thread. Humanizing data requires pairing facts with stories. After all, health data without context—that is, just numbers on their own—are too much of an abstraction to be useful. But who is the best messenger for the stories we need to tell? A local pediatrician highlighted the power of the media to positively change behaviors. She said many of her patients are far more receptive to messages from television than from her. The group seemed to settle on a strategy of multiple data storytellers, from social media to community television to the local newspaper to the health care community itself, in order to reach people across cultures, languages, and age groups—including those without access to the Internet. In addition to specific solutions, I was struck by the resourcefulness of these communities—their know-how, their drive, the deep knowledge they possess of local health needs and, importantly, their desire to work together in a coordinated way to use data to fashion effective responses. At the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), we’ve witnessed how this kind of community participation with health data played out so effectively in Humboldt County, where local leaders came together to examine causes for why they have substantially higher rates of elective procedures than other regions in the state. Inspired by that community’s desire to move beyond the problems posed by the data, we developed a multimedia story of their journey. There’s a saying in California that if you know one county, you know one county. But that doesn’t mean we need dozens of home-grown data tools; what’s needed instead are some clever, adaptable approaches that can be organically integrated into a community. I’m certain that health data products can be developed through this challenge that are flexible and modular enough to allow communities to integrate them to uniquely tackle what they’re facing.
  • Article

    California HealthCare Foundation: The data stops here

    Published August 19, 2013 by

    California HealthCare Foundation's Andy Krackov on News Challenge: Health from Knight Foundation on Vimeo. In addition to being a partner in the $2 million Knight News Challenge: Health, the California HealthCare Foundation has allocated an additional $100,000 to award to one or more ideas that show how to better integrate health data into local policymaking to spur improvement in people's lives. In California, a county supervisor is considering budget cuts to a local public hospital that could affect thousands of residents. Where can she turn for data? In an ideal world, that supervisor would have ready access to local breakdowns on poverty, insurance status, hospital finances and the prevalence of chronic conditions, among other measures. Some of this information exists at a local level, but it requires searching across an assortment of government sources, from the local health department to state agencies to the federal government. Accessing such a disorganized array is tough to do with limited staff resources. The reality is that too few local officials can readily tap the data needed to make decisions about health care in their communities. Earlier this year, we interviewed California county supervisors and their staffs to better understand how they now use (and would like to use) data to inform decisionmaking. Many individuals noted that they find it difficult to incorporate data into their work, either because they are inundated by information, don't know where to get the data they need, or because the data are too old or not geographically granular (such as by city or ZIP code).