March of Dimes turns data into information to promote best practices in prenatal care.

Case Study: March of Dimes

Well-known non-profit organization builds web applications that make important research data accessible to scientists, community health workers, and the public alike. These applications help community leaders to promote life-saving health practices and help extend the organization's mission to far-flung constituencies all over the U.S.

Notables:

• Peristats application launched on time in 2005
• Expanded mission and added features in 2006
• Application logged thousands of hours by community health workers and researchers all over the U.S. and Canada
• Success of project has spurred further development

Services:

• Application development
• Documentation
• Testing

Interface »View

Overview: Well-known non-profit organization builds web applications that make important research data accessible to scientists, community health workers, and the public alike. These applications help community leaders to promote life-saving health practices and help extend the organization mission to far flung constituencies all over the U.S.

Organization: March of Dimes was established in 1938 to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality. They carry out this mission through research, community services, education, and advocacy to save babies’ lives. March of Dimes researchers, volunteers, educators, outreach workers, and advocates work together to give all babies a fighting chance against the threats to their health: prematurity, birth defects, low birthweight.

Interface »View

Challenge: To harness vast quantities of perinatal research data and make it easily accessible on the web to professionals who can make a difference in prenatal health care.

Solution: A simple-to-use, yet highly intuitive and browser-based interface that anyone can use to build reports from a sophisticated database.

Result: Thousands of logged sessions in every state of the union as well as Canada. Success of project has spurred further development to further plumb vast data resources that can be used to help save infant lives.