Welcome to the Live Well Humboldt Website!
Below is an overview of what you can do on this site, how you can view and download data, and how to create your own custom dashboards. If you have additional questions, please visit the Help Center.
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Health indicators are collected from various sources - to name a few: American Community Survey (U.S. Census Bureau), California Department of Health, National Center for Education Statistics, California Department of Justice, and County Health Rankings.
You can search by keyword, which will bring up all the indicators that have some relation to that topic. There are three places to use a keyword search. One is in the center of the homepage:
Another place to use keywords is in the upper right-hand corner of any page, in the header ocean image. There is a "search this site" bar as well as an option to translate the page to Spanish or Hmong language.
The third is on the Community Health Dashboard page, which is circled in red in the image just below. These search modes are the best place to find related indicators if you know a general topic word.If you happen to know of a common term for health data, such as "infant mortality", you can use the search bars that say, "Find an indicator". These indicator portals are more specific to the site contents and may not capture more general terms as well as the keyword search does. If you are surprised that no results are found, it's a good idea to return to the keyword search and look there.
Pre-made dashboards, like the Disparities Dashboard, identify a specific subset of data from the larger set of indicators and allow for more focused search. Under the “Explore Data” tab, you will see “Community Health Dashboards,” which leads you to this view.
Using the three search bars (circled in red, above), you can:- Search for data by keyword (general terms)
- Find out what data are available by choosing an indicator from the dropdown menu
- View all data available for a specific location
Note: Not all indicators include information broken out by gender, race/ethnicity, etc. If these data do not appear when you select a particular indicator, it may be because the source does not include the breakout data or the data cannot be shared due to risk of identification. Similarly, some indicators are available at the county level only, where others are broken out by zip code, census tract, or census place (towns or neighborhood areas). To see geographic breakdowns for each indicator, click here.Data can be downloaded for each indicator you see on the site. Not all indicators display the data in the same way. Look for one of the three options below (circled in red) to download data as a bar chart, graph, Excel file, or map:
When viewing an indicator, notice along the left side of your screen a small vertical tab that reads, "See the Legend." If you click on the tab, it will expand to show you something like this, which explains the icons used on this site. When you have finished reading it, click on "Hide the Legend" and it will bounce back to the margin.
You can also see specific indicators that are grouped by topics that appear in the footer section of the website, by clicking on each icon (refer to the dark green band at the bottom of the webpage).
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You can access basic demographic data here, like population size, education and poverty levels. You can chose to view this data at the county level or for a specific census place.
Note: Not all indicators include information that is separated out by gender, race/ethnicity, etc. If these data do not appear when you select a particular indicator, it may be because the source does not include the breakout data or the data cannot be shared due to risk of identification. Similarly, some indicators are available at the county level only, where others are broken out by zip code, census tract, or census place (towns or neighborhood areas). To see geographic breakdowns for each indicator, click here.
To view available disparity data broken out by age, gender, and race/ethnicity, click here.
When viewing demographic and disparity data you can:
- Select specific geographic areas
- Search by zip codes*, census tracts, or census places
- Compare Humboldt County to CA or U.S. values
- Export figures into a spreadsheet file for further analysis or reports
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A catalogue of funding opportunities is maintained by Healthy Communities Institute, and local opportunities are posted as they become available. Click here to review the list. If you have relevant information to recommend for inclusion in this listing, please submit it via email to Live Well Humboldt.
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Building a Custom Dashboard
Using this feature, you can create a list of indicators for specific locations and/ or with specific comparisons. You can name the dashboard and save the file. You can also share the active link for this set of data with anyone in an email or through other media. They will always be able to pull up those data and get current information with whatever updates have been published on the site.
This is a handy tool for partners who work in specific areas and are relying on current data for writing grants or reports, for students working on a project with a specific population, etc.
There are two ways to select data: 1) hand pick indicators or 2) filter indicators. Depending on your needs, one will produce better results than the other.
There are two modes of searching for the information you want to appear in your custom dashboard. You can click on the tab in the upper righthand section (circled in red), which toggles back and forth between “hand pick indicators” and “filter indicators”.
If you know which specific data or indicators you are searching for (for example, alcohol and drug use), you will want to use the Hand Pick Indicators mode.
Let’s look for alcohol use indicators.
Now you can click “Search”. Scroll down to see your Custom Dashboard!
You can also search using the “Filter Indicators” tab.
Under “Filter & Display Subgroups,” you can ask for demographic categories, but remember not all indicators are broken out by things like age, race/ethnicity, etc.If you want a specific data source, you can filter by source. If you click "Filter by Sources", you will see a drop-down list of all the data sources available on the website.
This example shows results for a breast cancer indicator search. If you click on "Save a link to this search" (located under “Search Results,”) a window will pop up offering the URL that you can highlight, copy, and use to save to your computer, send in an email to others, or to post in social media or other communications.
Whenever someone accesses that link they will see the same dashboard with any updates that have been made on the website since you first created it.
If you have selected “Group by Indicator," your dashboard will display one indicator at a time with all selected (or available) locations beneath it. The title for each section will be the indicator title like in the image below.
If you selected “Group by Location”, and multiple locations of data are available, the title of each section would be the location. Within each section it will list all available indicators.
If you select “Indicator/Location Summary”, you will see the list of indicators with check marks identifying which locations the source will provide data for.
You will see additional options for displaying the data output at the bottom of the panel.
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Health data is compiled in a variety of ways - percentage (per 100), per 1,000 [persons], per 100,000 [persons], etc. To be able to compare across small and large populations, or populations that have a different age distribution, statisticians use several conventions to level the numerical values so that meaningful patterns can be drawn. For a basic understanding of the terms used on this site to describe data sources and methods of analysis and reporting, please see the FAQ section of the site, prepared by Healthy Communities Institute. You can use the "FAQ" link that appears on the footer of each page, or click on the link that appears at the end of this section.A note about reporting data in small populations such as ours: some communities are so small that reporting the number of cases of a particular disease might disclose individual identities and thus violate confidentiality. There are a few ways of dealing with this:1. A category value can be suppressed if it falls beneath a certain minimal threshold.2. Numbers can be based on a regional context, thereby widening the geographic range and protecting identities in small communities.3. Data can also be reported across multiple-year time periods, which allows for more uniform assessment of both small and large jurisdictions.Click here for the FAQ section.
