Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

To better understand the broader determinants of health and human service utilization in individual communities, it is essential to triangulate health and human service data, which often have limited socioeconomic information, with census and other data sources. However, existing geographic scales at which these data are available are not optimal (e.g. census tracts have large coefficients of variation). In New York City (NYC), census tracts have been aggregated into Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs), providing a geographic unit that is granular yet reliable and easily identifiable based on historic neighborhood boundaries. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH), the Center for Innovation through Data Intelligence and NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene are working with other partners to create small area health indicators at the NTA-level.

The NTA was developed by the NYC Department of City Planning to analyze and project the population of small areas. Each NTA consists of a number of census tracts that lie strictly within a Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA), which approximates a Community District (CD). There are 188 NTAs with an average population size of 45,000. In order to support the use of NTAs for this project, a geocoding tool was developed to automate the process of assigning geographic units. Data aggregated at the NTA were collected from various data sources, including Vital Statistics, Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS), Medicaid, Division of Disease Control, American Community Survey, Human Resources Administration, Department of Homeless Services, Department for the Aging, Administration for Children’s Services, NYC Department of Corrections, NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) Development Data Book, and NYC Police Department. Indicators and maps were created using SAS 9.2 and ArcGIS.

Preliminary NTA data have revealed that there are geographic areas of high service need that were not previously visible at the larger geographic level. These NTA data are being utilized by health and human service agencies to develop more targeted responses to community needs.

There are many benefits of describing data at the NTA-level. Use of the data for analysis and planning may result in more effective identification, design, and execution of interventions to advance community health and human service delivery in NYC. The choice of an appropriate geographic unit is instrumental for examining determinants of community health and service delivery, therefore the NTA approach could be readily generalized to other jurisdictions.