MassGIS Data: MA Executive Office of Health & Human Services Regions

April 2022

This datalayer represents the six regions delineated by the Commonwealth's Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS).

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Overview

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These regions are used by the Department of Public Health for statistical, care coordination and administrative purposes. The regions - Western, Central, Northeast, Metro West, Boston and Southeast - are based on geographical groupings of cities and towns (see map).

The two feature classes - polygon and arc - are stored in ArcSDE as REGEOHHS_POLY and REGEOHHS_ARC.

The polygon feature class was updated in August 2021 to be based on the Survey Towns Boundaries (previously based on the USGS-based town boundaries).

Production

MassGIS received a list of town IDs and associated regions from staff at the Department of Public Health, Office of Data Management and Outcomes Assessment (ODMOA) and joined it to the Municipalities layer. The layer was then dissolved by region to produce the six multi-part polygons in ArcMap. Population values were summed across each region and joined to the layer. Arcs were coded in coverage format in ArcInfo Workstation and converted to a geodatabase feature class.

Attributes

The polygon attribute table contains the following fields:

Field	Width/Type	Description
REG_NUM	1 / I	EOHHS Region Number (1-6)
REG_NAM	10 / C	EOHHS Region Name
POP1980	9 / I	1980 Population of region
POP1990	9 / I	1990 Population of region
POP2000	9 / I	2000 Population of region
POP2010	9 / I	2010 Population of region

The arc attribute table contains the following items:

Field	Width/Type	Description
OUTLINE	1 / I	Boundary type:  9 = EOHHS Region boundary  1 = State outline  4 = Coastline

Related Database Table

The table REGEOHHS_POLY_TOWNS identifies which towns fall within each EOHHS region. Items include:

Field	Description
TOWN_ID	Municipality ID, from Municipalities layer
TOWN	Municipality name, from Municipalities layer
REG_NUM	EOHHS Region Number (1-6)
REG_NAM	EOHHS Region Name

Maintenance

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health will provide any updates to MassGIS. The March 2019 update of this layer includes the populations from the 2010 Census.

MassGIS updated the data in April 2022 to reflect recent edits to the Municipalities layers.