Changes to the Health Center Sites data

In 2007 HRSA's Bureau of Primary Health Care (BPHC) began the process of changing the data management system that is used for the data related to their health care service delivery sites. These clinics, which are supported through HRSA's Health Center Cluster grant program (activity code H80) offered a variety of services, funded through a number of sub-programs including:

• Community Health Centers
• Health Care for the Homeless
• Health Centers Grants for Migrant and Seasonal Farm Workers
• Health Centers Grants for Residents of Public Housing
• Healthy Schools, Healthy Communities
• Integrated Health Care Services Delivery

As a part of the change in source, BPHC and the H80 grantees conducted a thorough review and update of the data. The review involved verifying that all of the sites in the database were accurately represented, adding new sites as needed, deleting sites that were no longer active, and checking and correcting the data.

The source change also introduced a number of new pieces of information about a site, eliminated outdated items, and redefined some others. Finally, it established a more definitive link between the grant data (years, amounts, recipient) and the associated service sites. Prior to the source change the linkage was implicit but not strictly enforced in the separate data systems (service sites and grants management).

As of mid-May 2008, the report formerly titled "Health Center Cluster Sites" (that presented the data drawn from the original source system) has been replaced by the report titled "Health Care Service Delivery Sites". The report contains information both about the grantees and about their associated sites.

The State Profile, County Profile, and County Detail reports have all been updated to use the new data, and the subsections of each have been relabeled accordingly.

Similarly, the change is reflected in the Map Tool and in the HRSA Data Warehouse map data service by the replacement of the Health Center Cluster Sites layer with two new layers:

• Health Care Service Delivery Sites and
• Health Care Service Delivery Grantees

The original Health Center Cluster Sites layer used two symbols to distinguish the "parent" site (roughly equivalent to the grantee location) from the "satellite" locations (places where patients could go to actually receive health care services). The change in the source made it desirable to separate these two types of sites into distinct layers, which can be mapped independently of one another.