As an industry we are just beginning to realize the potential that health analytics holds – not just for improving care but for increasing access to services.  One of today’s challenges in health care is to make data understandable and meaningful to those professionals working in population/public health and to the communities that surround them. Three methods that we need to further develop and use are user-centered design, interactive visualization, and awareness of the ecosystem of information that is available to us.  User-centered design means keeping our audiences as the focus of everything we do using specific design methods including those in which our users become our design partners. Interactive visualization, as developed by the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, The University of California San Francisco, and others takes complex information and makes it accessible. Users can easily query and visualize information.  And the large ecosystem of data around us provides further information to supplement more traditional medical records. In this talk, we provide examples and best practices of how these three strategies may improve population health data.