A Health Department's journey towards data informed programmatic delivery

About the Program

Category: Health (Best in Category)

Year: 2023

Public health has traditionally not had the connection to timely and granular data that can assist in program delivery. Our program delivery is often the result of historical funding and initiatives and not based on present community needs. Our department embarked on an initiative, with funding from the Kresge Foundation, in 2018 to move our department away from broad-based program delivery to include a more focused attention on communities with historical inequitable health outcomes using timely data to inform our program delivery. Our department is the largest public health department in Utah and because of that serves a growing and diverse population with a growing and changing need from public health. We began our journey before the COVID outbreak, but as was evidenced nationally, COVID highlighted even more the need for public health to have access to timely and granular data that is used to inform program delivery - where the services are provided, in what way, and at what times. What we wanted to accomplish through our initiative was to create a bureau of staff that would focus on working with programs to identify what data they create, what they use, how the data is used and is there a potential to connect to more data. Staff with these evaluation and analytical capabilities were mainly located in our Epidemiology Bureau and were more focused on disease investigation, not program data, analytics, or evaluation. The few staff that focused on program evaluation and analytics were randomly placed throughout the department and were more a product of grants that required these deliverables as part of the funding. The department had a real need to create a bureau where staff with analytics and evaluation capability could work together in a cohesive unit rather than placed in separate areas of the department so that a synergy could be created, with focus on identifying skills that the group needed to improve the services they could provide to department programs. We knew this Bureau needed to be viewed as a department resource rather than placed in a specific division tied to a specific funding source. With staff assistance, we created this Bureau (Population Health and Informatics- PHIB) in late 2019, bringing staff together from different areas of the department, we braided funding sources so that the created team worked together rather than siloed depending on their funding and placed this new Bureau in the department's administration division. PHIB, once created, hit the ground running and even with the interruption of the department's COVID response has led to better understanding of what data our programs create (through a data scan) what skills the team needs to become more proficient on, specific data projects for programs that programs are using to inform their program delivery.