Background
New Hampshire HealthWRQS is a community health web reporting and querying system that allows public health professionals to access a wealth of commonly used public health statistics for standard and customized geographic areas. The HealthWRQS project is an initiative of the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, in partnership with the New Hampshire Office of Information Technology (OIT) and the New Hampshire Institute of Health Policy and Practice.
The system is currently in production with a suite of reports for commonly-used health indicators, called Standard Indicator Reports, that calculate age-adjusted rates and statistical benchmarking against the state rates for user selectable sub-state areas in real-time. The reports include statistics on cancer incidence, births and birth outcomes, causes of death, and reasons for hospitalizations and emergency room visits. In total, there are over 100 reports that can be run for one of five different user selectable geographic types relevant to New Hampshire where the user can selectively define aggregated regions made up of those areas (e.g., a user can run a report that combines the 16 specific towns served by a hospital).
The HealthWRQS reports are requested by users and generated via a Cognos 7 Upfront Intranet website behind the DHHS firewall that queries data stored in an Oracle data warehouse. Users can save generated reports in PDF, text, HTML, or Microsoft Excel formats.
HealthWRQS is deployed behind the DHHS firewall because of the need in NH to supply town-level data and associated privacy issues. Because of the need to be behind the firewall, approved external users must connect through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection.
