The Virginia Health Opportunity Index (HOI) website uses interactive dashboards to make the HOI accessible, interesting and easy to understand. The dashboards offer a variety of perspectives for viewing the HOI, including multiple geographic levels and profiles. We encourage you to explore the many pathways the dashboards provide to understand the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) in your community. This post provides a guide for the many buttons, maps and pop-ups in the Counties dashboards.
The Health Opportunity Landscape Dashboard
The Health Opportunity Landscape dashboard allows you to see where your county stands in relation to other counties in Virginia in the HOI and its four profiles. The dashboard consists of three parts: the map in the upper left corner, rankings in the upper right corner, and visualization scales in the lower part of the dashboard.
Using the Map
The map shows Virginia’s 134 counties and independent cities colored by Local Health District (LHD). Hover the cursor over a locality in the map
to highlight it in the visualization scales. Hovering the cursor over the map area also reveals a map toolkit on the left side of the map. You can use this tool to zoom in, zoom out, or to return to the “home” view. Hover
over the right arrow at the bottom to reveal advanced zooming and selection tools. You can use these tools to zoom into specific areas of the map or to select groups of localities. To pan the map, click and hold the left mouse button. This will allow you to “grab” the map and move it around in the frame.
The Rankings
Click on a locality to select it and reveal it rank in the HOI and its four profiles in the upper right corner. Selecting a locality affects all sections of the dashboard. Hold the <ctrl> key or use the advanced selection tool to select multiple localities. Clicking on a selected locality clears the selection. Alternatively, use the Local Health District dropdown at the top of the rankings to select all of the localities in a LHD. To clear a selected LHD, return this dropdown to “(All)”. When multiple localities are selected the rankings boxes show the median rank of the selected localities. If an odd number of localities are selected this is the middle locality in the rankings. If an even number of counties are selected this is the halfway point between the two most central localities.
The Visualization Scales
The charts at the bottom of the map show the distribution of the localities in the HOI and its four profiles. Each locality is represented by an outline of its shape, and is shaded by opportunity level (very high, high, average, low & very low). Hover over a locality in any of the charts to highlight it in each of the other charts and in the map. Hovering over a locality also reveals a “tooltip” which includes additional details on opportunity level and ranking. Click on a locality to select it or <Ctrl>+click to select multiple localities. The map will zoom in on selected localities.
A Closer Look
By scrolling down to the next dashboard you can view the HOI and its profiles at the census tract level. Click on the radio buttons in the upper left hand corner to scroll through the HOI and its four profiles. To select individual localities or groups of localities, use the check box list to the left of the map. Before selecting, deselect the “All” check box to clear the selections. The map will zoom to the selected entities. Alternatively, you may use the map toolkit as described above.
