Public Data as Public Health Infrastructure

Paper by David D. Chen  et al: “Public health efforts addressing chronic disease and poverty require information that describes local conditions, preserves historical comparisons, and can be interpreted by the communities expected to act on it. Delaware’s My Healthy Community (MHC) platform brought health and social data together within a shared interface. Its 2025 decommissioning and transition to distributed sources offer a case for examining what community access to public data requires. We argue that access depends not on publication alone but on sustained stewardship and interpretive capacity. Adapting Penchansky and Thomas’s five dimensions of access (availability, accessibility, accommodation, affordability, and acceptability), we use Delaware examples, including a dated, topic-by-topic inventory, to show how access can erode even when data remain technically public. Substitute measures may not answer the original question, historical releases may become difficult to retrieve, and distributed sources require documentation and assistance. Free data also carry costs in staff time and expertise, and unexplained changes can weaken trust. Artificial intelligence makes analysis easier to produce without making it easier to verify, increasing the importance of these supports. We propose maintaining historical releases, documenting changes, and funding the partnerships and interpretive support required for responsible community use…(More)”.