Article by Ian Leavitt and Margaret Arnesen: “Comprehensive, timely data helps policymakers and public health officials identify, track, prevent, and treat a variety of health issues, from communicable diseases such as measles to maternal and child health concerns to the opioid epidemic. But throughout the country, this data exists in separate agencies and departments, and numerous barriers prevent connecting the different data sources.
Some states are implementing promising approaches to help agencies better share data. A new brief from The Pew Charitable Trusts examines how Massachusetts is supporting the use of cross-sector data from various agencies or departments that is analyzed holistically to target more effective public health efforts.
Fully understanding these types of health threats—where they’re concentrated, how they’re spreading, and who’s at greatest risk—requires many different types of data. Health care providers, public health scientists, social workers, and insurers can analyze their own data but often cannot easily share, connect, and compare information with each other. This makes it difficult to get a more nuanced understanding of a locality’s health—and the threats it faces.
In 2017, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) created the Public Health Data Warehouse. By linking data from multiple sources, including health, housing, family services, and other public agencies, the warehouse allows state and local health departments, colleges and universities, health care providers, foundations, private companies, think tanks, and other interested parties to analyze and address priority health and quality of life issues in a comprehensive way.
“The driving force behind [the warehouse] was realizing that we had all of these disparate data points telling a piece of the story, but not the whole story together,” Dana Bernson, director of the Data Science, Research, and Epidemiology Division in the Office of Population Health, Massachusetts DPH, said in an interview with Pew…(More)”.
