June Newsletter

June 2019 Newsletter

FEATURED POST

Breaking Down Barriers to Healthy Living with Medical Spending Estimates

One of the major obstacles for people with chronic health conditions to leading longer, healthier lives is the rising expense of prescription medications. Even for those with insurance coverage, out of pocket prescription costs can be prohibitively high.

Data on these costs can help public health officials, planners, providers, and advocates craft programs to help residents obtain the medicine they need through two main avenues—helping people meet their out-of-pocket costs and curbing rising prices.

PolicyMap has developed new Medical Spending Estimates data that allow users to see which neighborhoods are likely burdened the most by medical expenses.

BLOG POST

Improved Home Sale Data: Because Not Everyone Lives in a Single-Family Home

Traditionally, home sale data focuses only on single-family homes, and doesn’t take other housing types, like condos, into account. This isn’t useful in dense cities like New York, so we developed new housing data that includes a variety of housing types.

Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) eligibility is updated to include 2019 distressed and underserved classification criteria.

Data on unbanked and underbanked households from the FDIC is updated to 2013-2017.

Small business loans and small farm loans from the FFIEC through the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is updated through 2017.

Food insecurity data from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap project, including total food insecure persons, child food insecure persons, food budget shortfall, and average cost per meal, is updated to 2017.

Disaster resilience data through the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) project from the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina is now available on PolicyMap.

Data on structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges, from the USDOT National Bridge Inventory, is updated to 2018.

Census Public School Finance data, including total expenditures on elementary and secondary education, net revenue, total revenue and what revenue comes from local, state, or federal funding sources, is updated to 2018.

Medical Spending Estimates, a new dataset, developed by PolicyMap and Quantitative Innovations, is now available on PolicyMap. You can read more about this premium subscriber dataset on our Data Directory or in the blog post mentioned above.

PolicyMap’s home sale data now includes several new housing categories: single family alone, two to four unit multifamily, and condominiums and cooperative housing. More information about the dataset, which is updated to include data for the second quarter in 2018, can be found in our recent blog post.

PolicyMap has created a new Curriculum Resources page where professors can find tools for introducing PolicyMap to their students.

June 20-25, 2019

PolicyMap will be attending the 2019 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC

July 9-10, 2019

PolicyMap will be moderating a panel on data visualization at the 2019 Annual Conference of the Association of Public Data Users in Arlington, Virginia

June Newsletter

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