Strength in numbers: Nonprofit launches consortium to improve public health data and outcomes
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The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials is launching a cross-sector data program to improve public health departments’ access to and quality of data.
Public health data systems are a critical piece of government, helping leaders track threats like viral outbreaks or assess the impacts of poor air quality to improve resident outcomes and safeguard their communities. But obtaining and maintaining access to such data resources remains a challenge, which is where a new collaborative effort among private and public organizations intends to fill in the gap.
The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials is building a public health data consortium that aims to establish a data exchange among public health agencies in a bid to improve health data accessibility and quality, the nonprofit announced last month.
The consortium serves as an “additive” to ongoing efforts among federal, state and local governments to modernize public health data infrastructure, said Dr. Jen Layden, senior vice president at ASTHO.
One such effort, she noted, is the Consolidated Appropriations Act signed by President Donald Trump last month that includes $360 million for supporting public health infrastructure and capacity and $185 million to modernize data surveillance and analytics for state and local health departments.
Even with that boost, “public health funding is always underfunded,” Layden said, which impacts data quality and access for health jurisdictions.
“Data is vital to the work we do in public health to detect outbreaks … identify novel threats, understand trends [and] provide information” for communities, but public health systems “haven’t historically been very integrated,” she said.
A disparate, antiquated public health data ecosystem "hinders not just the work of public health, but it hinders people understanding about diseases and trusting [public health agencies] as a good source of information,” Layden said.
To better inform public health decisions, and ultimately, strengthen communities’ trust in those efforts, ASTHO’s consortium will connect public and private organizations’ resources. The cross-sector collaboration will expand the breadth of available data to health departments, including “real-world data” that jurisdictions may not have access to otherwise, like commercial lab data or medical and pharmacy claims data, Layden explained.
The consortium can help bolster data collection and analysis efforts on priority areas for many states, like maternal health and disease surveillance to prevent and more efficiently manage outbreaks like measles, she said.
Health care data firm Veritas Data Research, will support the consortium’s data exchange by offering agencies access to leverage its platform and other data resources. HealthVerity, a health data analytics company, will also provide identity resolution and data privacy support for the consortium.
“Under the governance of ASTHO, all state and territorial health agencies can securely pool their data to improve clinical practice and innovation,” Jason LaBonte, CEO at Veritas Data Research, a health care data firm, said in a statement. “In return, the agencies can combine their data with national real-world data to power better public health.”
ASTHO is currently conducting outreach and accepting inquiries from interested state participants, Layden said, and the nonprofit hopes to have six to eight jurisdictions onboarded in the next couple of months to help inform the consortium’s early priorities, such as mortality data.