Title: March of Dimes Launches New Data Web Site
Author:
Section/SPIG: Maternal and Child Health
Issue Date:
On August 17, 2004, the March of Dimes officially launched the new PeriStats Web site at <www.marchofdimes.com/peristats>. Developed by the March of Dimes Perinatal Data Center, PeriStats provides free access to maternal and infant health-related data at the national, state, county, and city level, and was developed to ensure that health professionals, researchers, medical librarians, policymakers, students, and the media have easy access to this information. Funding was provided by the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health through a two-year grant collaboration with the New York Academy of Medicine.
Founded on research aimed to understand how different audiences use health-related data, the new PeriStats system was designed to compile vast amounts of maternal and infant health data and make it useful and accessible. Despite the large volume of information, all data is available within two clicks of any Web page. Data are updated throughout the year, and helpful for multiple tasks, including fact-finding, health assessments, grant writing, policy development, lectures and presentations. As part of the grant, the March of Dimes Perinatal Data Center and The New York Academy of Medicine will be incorporating relevant biomedical literature searches that link directly from PeriStats to the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE/PubMed biomedical literature database. They will also be providing perinatal data training for health professionals and medical librarians.
Aggregating data from 11 government agencies and organizations, PeriStats provides access to the most current maternal and infant health statistics on topics such as preterm birth, infant mortality, tobacco use, cesarean section rates, and health insurance coverage. Detailed information by race, ethnicity, and maternal age for many indicators is available. To communicate this information, PeriStats produces printer-ready graphs, maps, and tables that can be copied and pasted into reports and presentations. The site also provides functionality enabling you to make comparisons between states, counties, and cities and to the United States. Over 60,000 graphs, maps and tables are available on PeriStats, and data are always referenced to the relevant source and Healthy People 2010 objective.
Future Web site releases will include additional maternal and infant health data from U.S. government agencies and organizations. Updates will be communicated through the PeriStats e-mail newsletter, and sign-up is available on the homepage. To contact the March of Dimes Perinatal Data Center, send an e-mail to <peristats@marchofdimes.com>, or call Michael Davidoff at (914) 997-4549.