Franciscan Health and BroadStreet recently launched a new collaboration with the hope of leveraging data into action using nationally available dashboards for promoting violence prevention across communities.
The dashboards present evidence-based interventions specific to a community's demographics and socioeconomic factors. To create the dashboards, Stacey Quick, Franciscan Health community health improvement coordinator, worked alongside BroadStreet CEO and Cofounder Tracy Flood and her team. Together, they envisioned a data-driven, solution-focused framework for preventing violence at both the individual and community levels.
"The unique part of this dashboard is being able to show exactly how environment and socioeconomic status place individuals and communities at higher risks for violence," Quick said. "The data reveals that higher risk for violence is consistent with higher risk for chronic illness, substance abuse and mental health decline. This supports the recent movements in healthcare to addressing needs related to social determinants of health and health equity."
Flood says this project brings together each partner’s expertise.
“We brought our love of telling stories with data,” Flood said. “Franciscan uses data for making a real-world impact in their region. Working in collaboration, we wanted a story on BroadStreet that could really empower the work that Franciscan was doing with those long-term relationships and the violence prevention story was born.”
Violence has many forms that include family violence, violence between individuals, self-directed violence and community violence. Violence and exposure to violent acts have long-lasting, wide-reaching effects that extend far beyond the individuals involved. In a community, high rates of violence impact health outcomes, increasing the risk for physical inactivity, substance abuse and poorer mental health, all of which have negative impacts on the community as a whole.
The violence prevention dashboard defines the different forms of violence, reveals how a community is impacted, who in the community is most at risk and identifies opportunities for prevention.
The dashboard is designed to showcase what prevention-based interventions are available along with resources for different populations.
"It allows for a comprehensive view where the protective factors related to social connections overlap with preventing multiple forms of trauma and violence,” Quick said. “This approach allows for resources to be invested that will have overreaching effects on both improving health disparity and increasing community cohesion."
The Violence Prevention dashboards can be set up for custom areas by anyone via BroadStreet to see data relevant to their local community, though data collection varies between states. This aids in engaging a variety of stakeholders to see what steps can be taken to lower the risk for violence while also building healthier communities.
The hope is that communities across the nation will be able to use this dashboard to provide guidance in the direction of local prevention strategies based on data-driven, evidence-based approaches.
The “Preventing Violence” reports are online for each of the regions served by a Franciscan Health hospitals at broadstreet.io/board/story/franciscan-health.
A webinar workshop recording on using the dashboards is available at youtu.be/y72UYpFQ_Co or at the BroadStreet Data Co-Op website at learn.broadstreet.io/video/.
This is the third collaboration between Franciscan and BroadStreet, which previously worked together on dashboards addressing infant mortality and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
Those interested in learning more about Franciscan Health's work in trauma informed care and violence prevention can email stacey.quick@franciscanalliance.org. More information about BroadStreet is available by emailing tracy@broadstreet.io or online at learn.broadstreet.io.
