Across the United States, state and local public health agencies are working to keep our communities healthy. Doing so means understanding both the challenges those communities face and the services they need most. So when health officials in Pima County, Arizona, wanted to find a way to better connect with local residents, they began searching for a solution.
“They wanted to develop a platform that allowed bidirectional communication between them and the community,” said Sara Iguodala, a business analyst with the Pima County Health Department. “They wanted to be more inviting to gain a new perspective on the way they work with their community and with public health in general. And that resulted in the Healthy Pima platform.”
Built as a way for individuals to contribute directly to developing and implementing community health programs, Healthy Pima is a dynamic online hub where community members can discuss vital health topics, share ideas and actively participate in health initiative committees. Launched in 2025, the Healthy Pima platform includes links to public health resources, a “Share Your Story” section where community members can shine a light on community successes and a discussion forum where community members can connect on issues of public health.
“This is an iterative process, and we wanted to make the platform as useful as possible,” Iguodala said. “By adding the discussion board forum the idea was to create a space where the community could provide their experiences, lived experiences around what they're battling with, their interactions with state or county entities in the community and discuss health priorities and initiatives that will impact them most.”
Local residents take part in a tobacco awareness campaign supported by the Pima County Department of Health.
Pima County public health officials join local residents to raise awarness at an event in Tuscon.
Sara Iguodala, a business anaylst with the Pima County Health Department.
As the business analyst for Pima County, Iguodala was hired through the CDC Foundation’s WorkForce Action Initiative (WAI). Launched in 2024, the WAI project is designed to help modernize the nation’s public health workforce, placing more than 140 staff in more than 70 state, tribal, local and territorial public health agencies across the nation to bolster public health capacity. Hired in 2025, Iguodala’s primary goal was helping Pima County design and implement the Healthy Pima platform—a process, she said, that started from within.
“We started by having real in-depth conversations around our ‘why.’ Why are we doing what we’re doing?” Iguodala said. “From that we prioritized providing data that's useful and relevant to the people who are looking at it. We can do all this amazing work, but if nobody uses it, what is it good for?” To develop indicators on what data would be most useful, Iguodala and the Pima County team went directly to the community itself, reaching out through focus groups to gather information on who would be using the platform, how they would be using it and what information they would like to see reflected. That outreach was key element of the project, Iguodala said.
“Pulling the community in was one of their biggest challenges, but also one of the biggest priorities for this project—creating a sense of ownership and trust,” Iguodala said. “One of the things I say is that trust is built when people are part of the process.”
We prioritized providing data that's useful and relevant to the people who are looking at it.
With the first iteration of the site up and running, Iguodala says the next step is to find ways to make the collected data more accessible. Data engineers in Pima County are working to develop a system that will ultimately feed the relevant data directly to a live dashboard where it can be quickly available to the community. The work, Iguodala says, is a perfect fit for her interests and skills, coming to her role from a long background in public health and recognizing the vital role that data plays in keeping communities healthy.
“I always knew I wanted to stay anchored to public health, but there were other skillsets that I picked up along the way that I felt were essential, and data was just one of them,” Iguodala said. “There are a lot of spaces where public health and data intersect, which we know is vital to a lot of the work we do in public health.”
