The Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) has unveiled a new data portal that Hoosiers can use to review county- and state-level birth and death data from 2011-2015.
The portal incorporates information from written natality and mortality reports into an interactive dashboard that allows visitors to examine five-year live birth counts, fertility rates, birth outcomes and causes of death by county of residence, age group, gender and race and ethnicity. The portal also includes an infant mortality dashboard that shows the number and rate of children who died before their first birthday by county of residence and race and ethnicity.
“Reducing Indiana’s infant mortality rate is a top priority of the state health department, but we can’t do it alone,” said State Health Commissioner Jerome M. Adams, M.D., M.P.H. “Making this data more easily accessible to our local health departments and community leaders will help inform our conversations and bring more people together to help in this fight.”
The portal is available at http://www.in.gov/isdh/27465.htm. Birth outcome data include percentages of women who received prenatal care in the first trimester, those who were breastfeeding when they were discharged from a birthing facility, those who smoked during pregnancy and those who delivered babies with low birth weights. All of these factors have been shown to impact Indiana’s infant mortality rate.
The mortality dashboard lists rates of deaths from 39 selected causes included in the National Vital Statistics Report. They include cancers, HIV, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, suicide, motor vehicle accidents and homicide.
The data portal is a complement to StatsExplorer, which ISDH unveiled in April and includes data related to the opioid epidemic and other health indicators.
