Data Sources Overview

The 500 Cities Project is a product of the CDC and the RWJ Foundation, and it reports city- and census tract-level data for various chronic disease measures for 500 cities in the United States. We gathered data on mammography use from this data source, along with other screening rates in the adult female population (e.g. pap smear rates and core older adult women preventive measures).

We utilized this database to acquire the number of breast cancer deaths in each city, as well as other socioeconomic and environmental determinants of health.

The City Health Dashboard acquires information on breast cancer deaths from the National Vital Statistics System of the National Center for Health Statistics, and the dashboard aggregates other health metrics from various data sources such as the American Community Survey.

This database provides information about facilities offering mammography services, including hospitals, community health centers, and imaging centers.

We utilized this database to gauge how many facilities offering mammography are located in each of the 500 cities under analysis as well as to plot the facilities specifically in New York City.

This source hosts many open source datasets related to a variety of measures and outcomes in New York City. We utilize data from this source in order to map our variables of interest to the NYC census tracts.