Practicum Highlight: Jonathan Weatherly, D'90, MPH'24

Making Data Work: Review of Mobile Asthma Clinic's use of a Health Atlas to Support Resource Allocation Decisions and Outcomes Measurement

As a senior executive working at the intersection of corporate risk and sustainability, long-time Chicago resident Jonathan Weatherly D’90 had three decades of experience in the field and an MBA in finance. To enhance his expertise and delve deeper into the nexus of climate, public health, and equity, he enrolled in Dartmouth’s hybrid master’s of public health.“I didn’t appreciate the full scope of what public health is and the impact it has across the board,” says Weatherly, who has lived in Chicago since he earned his bachelor’s in economics. “My MPH cohort was a very broad and diverse group—including MDs, PhDs, and of course public health–track professionals—so it made conversations and live interactions way better than I would have dreamed.”

For his practicum, Weatherly approached the executive director of Mobile Care Chicago (MCC), which provides free, comprehensive medical care at school sites to underserved Chicagoland children with asthma. Helping families better control a child’s asthma by bringing mobile health clinics directly to school sites, MCC reduces emergency department visits and improves education attendance and academic performance, interventions that can lead to a lifetime of socioeconomic improvements in a child’s trajectory. “I’m very aware of a number of MCC’s problems and opportunities, and there’s been a lot of growth,” says Weatherly, a founding board member who has served the nonprofit for two decades. “I said, what’s on your list of items that you’ve wanted to tackle?”

The MCC staff asked Weatherly to apply his data analytics capabilities on their behalf. His practicum documented how the nonprofit uses the Chicago Health Atlas to optimally focus their services on schools with high asthma prevalence and to measure outcomes over time to assess program impact. He also identified data gaps and helped MCC make the case for specific improvements to the Atlas that would enhance MCC’s resource allocation decisions and outcomes analyses.

Weatherly expects to continue applying his enhanced analytical skills on MCC’s behalf even after he completes his degree, investigating climate-change impacts at the zip-code level in Chicago to uncover how climate change affects disparities in asthma rates.“I knew I could do something useful for this organization I love,” he says, “but it was really cool to actually apply things I learned in courses—like biostatistics insights and epidemiology approaches—to do geography-based and race and ethnicity-based comparisons.”

POSTED 3/25/2024 AT 02:32 PM IN #practicum