The Northwest Tribal Epidemiology Center (NWTEC), housed within the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board (NPAIHB), is preparing to launch Beta testing of the Northwest Tribal Data Hub application (Data Hub) to an initial cohort of Northwest Tribes during the summer of 2024. This milestone will signify the culmination of three and a half years of planning, learning, and developing the foundational infrastructure of the Data Hub. As we near this milestone, NWTEC’s Data Hub team reflects on the successes and lessons learned from this developmental phase of the platform.

What is the Northwest Tribal Data Hub?

At its core, the Northwest Tribal Data Hub seeks to connect Northwest Tribal Nations with their data. When fully developed, the Data Hub will provide Tribes in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington with secure, direct, and easy access to public health data on topics such as demographics, cancer, substance use and overdose, leading causes of death, and other public health issues within their Tribal areas. The Data Hub utilizes data obtained from state and federal agencies, including vital records, disease registries, and health surveys. When possible, the data have been improved for Tribal communities by correcting the misclassification of AI/AN people. Tribes will access the Data Hub through a secure login and can view, interact with, and download data through visual and interactive dashboards. Each Tribe will be able to view key public health indicators for their Tribal service area, state, and the Northwest region.

Building NWTEC’s Data and Tribal Engagement Infrastructure

The Data Hub represents a significant investment in modernizing NWTEC’s data and information technology infrastructure. The initial planning phase included defining our goals and outcomes for the Data Hub, assessing the feasibility of its development, and engaging four Tribes in a proof of concept to test the underlying technology and gauge interest in further development. As part of that planning phase, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment emerged as the best platform to host the Data Hub. The first, foundational step of the development phase was to design, build, and test the Data Hub’s security to ensure confidential data are protected and accessible through the data pipeline. With platform’s security developed and tested, NWTEC’s data assets were migrated to a database and formatted to support the analysis and visualization of public health indicators. The data visualization tool, QuickSight, is used to develop interactive dashboards that report key indicators on Northwest Tribes’ priority health issues. The first dashboard to be launched addresses one of the Northwest Tribes’ highest priority issues – drug overdoses.

 

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