Our Work

The State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) helps states monitor rates of health insurance coverage and understand factors associated with a lack of insurance. Each year, SHADAC processes and enhances U.S. Census data and assists health researchers, policy makers, and journalists with their analyses. Until recently, the data extraction process was very manual. End users had to funnel their requests for custom views through SHADAC staff, and staff were required to manually aggregate, manipulate, and parse the requested data. Needless to say, this process left much of this gold mine of data inaccessible to site visitors.

Forum One greatly improved the efficiency of this process by allowing users to automatically generate their own tables and graphs from over 10 million rows of data by pre-selecting variables such as source, state, and demographic filters. The resulting outputs display the number of insured, privately insured, and government-insured individuals by state for the selected variables. Users have the option to export tables to Excel or as a PDF, save their settings for future analysis, or embed their custom visualizations within another web site. Forum One made this entire process seamless and transparent to users by integrating the custom-built application with SHADAC's Drupal web site -- previously developed by Forum One -- and by iteratively developing and testing the prototype and visual design to ensure that the complex data sets were easily discoverable.