Data Storyteller

In this session, participants learned why and how lived expertise must be sought after and valued by health centers and allied organizations to improve every stage of the data management process from collection and analysis to data sharing, access, and decision-making, including discussion about Information Blocking rules and navigating the tension between reporting and regulations. This session also covered the connection between racial equity and lived experience in data management.

The National Health Care for the Homeless Council and the HITEQ Center hosted a free webinar on Tuesday, February 6th, 2024, from 2 – 3 pm Eastern (1 - 2 pm Central) where they taught participants how to screen for housing status and other Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) measures that can be introduced or better integrated into health center clinical workflows. Presenters shared guidance on implementing and systematizing social needs data collection in Electronic Health Records (EHRs), followed by a panel of expert health center representatives who spoke about their programs’ journeys with social needs screening programs. Participants had the opportunity to ask questions, share successes, or discuss specific challenges they faced regarding social needs screening. 

While this webinar focused on health care for the homeless (HCH) health centers, anyone involved directly in social needs screening or interested in improving screening processes was welcome to attend.

So, you’re not a statistician? Not a data scientist either? Great! This webinar series is for the data creators, data generators, data users, data reviewers, and others who work with their health center data each day. If you’re a data lover and you know the information you have in your health center has an important story to tell, this series will provide you with the tools and techniques to create and share insights that will drive genuine change in your health center. Fostering a data-driven culture links directly to improvements in patient care, staff and provider satisfaction, and business imperatives, allowing us to make meaning out of our daily data demands.

Session 1 - Beyond the Bar Chart: Blending Data and Storytelling

Looking up articles about communicating data, you're likely to find many reflections on how to tell stories with data when crafting data visualizations. Effectively blending data, visualization, and storytelling together can take many different formats though depending on your audience and your goal. During this workshop, you'll learn about the research behind why stories can make information more memorable, how to balance data and narrative in different contexts, and some of the sticky challenges we face as designers when incorporating storytelling in the context of healthcare where privacy, ethical representation of the people behind the numbers, and issues of misinformation are critical considerations. We'll walk through practical examples of how to tell 'short stories' through annotations and headlines and larger endeavors of blending individual stories like qualitative interview data with quantitative visualizations. You'll leave with ideas you can apply in your own efforts communicating data and recommended resources for exploring the intersection of data and storytelling.

In recent years, health centers have become increasingly interested in and charged with not only addressing the health concerns of their patients, but centering and responding to patient’s social needs. According to Healthy People 2030, social needs, also known as the social determinants of health, are the conditions in the environments where people live, learn, work, and play that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Social needs encompass the quality of and access to resources such as housing, transportation, safety, employment, food, and more. Identifying and addressing unmet social needs as part of the clinical encounter provides the opportunity to deliver higher-quality, whole-person care, advance population health, and reduce healthcare costs.