Overcoming Data Challenges Panel

This panel, presented at stakeholder convening, Strengthening Community-Clinical Linkages to Improve Health Outcomes, hosted by the Centers for Disease for Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), highlights opportunities and challenges related to cross-sector data sharing, as well as strategies, tools, and resources that help stakeholders overcome these challenges.

Projects mentioned in the presentation:

  • Allegheny Data Sharing Alliance for Health: A project led by the Allegheny County Health Department that used a connected data warehouse combining data from multiple sectors to create a more complete picture of the factors impacting residents’ cardiovascular health.
  • King County Data Across Sectors for Housing and Health: A project led by Public Health – Seattle & King County to link public housing authority data with Medicaid claims records to obtain key information about the health issues facing residents.

DASH funding programs

  • DASH CIC-START: A program to help local collaborations catalyze their efforts to share and use multi-sector data to improve community health.
  • DASH Mentor Program: A program that supports experienced organizations to create opportunities that foster learning and implementation for small groups of “mentees.”

DASH/All In participants with a link to AHC communities:

Additional resources:

New resources coming in 2019:

  • The Legal Bibliography for Data Sharing: 100+ papers, toolkits and other materials focused on privacy, consent and policies, developed with the Network for Public Health Law. You may view a beta version of the site here.
  • The All In Knowledgebase: 800+ resources of all types to cover the wide and wild diversity of multi-sector data sharing projects across the country.
  • State Policies to Support Community Data Sharing: Practical planning to identify states that are supporting or interested in supporting their local communities to share multi-sector data, including state data.
  • National Snapshot of Data-Sharing Collaborations: A national survey, kicking off this month, to document the kinds and location of community-focused data sharing projects.
  • The National Inventory of Data-Sharing Collaborations for Health: A national survey, kicking off next week, to document the kinds and location of community-focused data sharing projects. Email info@dashconnect.org to make sure you are invited to participate.
  • The All In National Meeting: An annual meeting bringing together stakeholders from around the country that are at the forefront of the movement to improve health through multi-sector partnerships to share data.
  • The Practical Playbook: Public Health and Primary Care Together: A book that provides commentary from experts working to advance collaborations to improve population health, which will be updated in 2019.
  • Well-being in the Nation (WIN) Measurement Framework: Measures for Improving Health, Well-being, and Equity Across Sectors. A parsimonious set of indicators developed by measurement experts under the aegis of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics.

Two networks we love

  • 100 Million Healthier Lives and their SCALE initiative: An initiative to develop and scale a model of community transformation called Community of Solutions–a set of skills and behaviors that can lead to culture change and sustainable improvement in health, wellbeing, and equity.
  • National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership: A collaborative effort by the Urban Institute and local partners to further the development and use of neighborhood information systems in local policymaking and community building.

And another: Network for Public Health Law

To help health agencies, organizations and collaboratives navigate laws and regulations to effectively use data in support of community health, the Network has an extensive collection
of resources, trainings and tools, including:

  • The De-identification Toolkit provides multiple tools and resources to address legal and practical considerations in using and sharing de-identified data and is intended for a broad audience of health officials, privacy officers, public health practitioners, data managers and their attorneys.
  • This collection of 22 Data and Federal Privacy Law Snapshots provides an overview of the basic requirements of different federal data protection laws, including FERPA and HIPAA, and is intended to help agencies and organizations better understand legal protections associated with datasets collected by federal agencies or as part of a federally funded program like Medicaid and WIC.
  • To improve important data sharing, health departments that elected to be fully covered by HIPAA should re-evaluate the option to generally restrict HIPAA to only those programs that are required under law to comply with HIPAA. The HIPAA Hybrid Toolkit includes legal, policy and practical guidance to understand and implement HIPAA’s hybrid entity option.
  • NPHL will host the Public Health Law Summit: Data Sharing to Improve Community Health on October 3-4 in Plymouth, MI, providing attorneys, privacy officers, health officials, and public health and community practitioners with practical, in-depth information and tools to navigate the complex legal landscape.

Where do you even begin to initiate a collaboration around data?

Start by looking for the intersection of mission imperatives of potential partners to find a shared sense of value in sharing data and trying to figure out what’s already known about my question. For these two things, I’d plug two resources that we’ve developed: a series of papers that we’re doing about finding the value in shared data from different sectors (we have three papers done in the series) and a brand-new resource that we intend to soft-launch at this meeting (a bibliography of legal resources that we co-developed with the Network for Public Health Law).

All In Partner Calls for Proposals

How can you get better connected?

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