By Clare Tanner, PhD, Co-Director of Data Across Sectors for Health at the Michigan Public Health Institute A growing number of health care providers are strategically aligning with other sectors to collect data that allows them to gain a better understanding of patients’ social determinants of health (SDOH)—such as access to food, housing, and employment—as these factors have a profound impact on health. As Co-Director of Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH), I have witnessed the challenges...

All In: Data for Community Health, a learning network focused on transforming health through partnerships to share data, is actively working to help more communities make progress towards using multi-sector data to tackle community health challenges. In an effort to further support communities participating in All In, Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH) offered five new awards through CIC-START, a program that provides limited funds to help local leaders take meaningful steps toward planning o...

This blog was originally published on the On Center blog of the National Rural Health Resource Center.  To provide coordinated care that meets patients’ needs, many networks and communities are developing information systems to share data across clinical and social service settings. In order for these systems to be effective in connecting patients to the right services at the right time, care teams need access to relevant individual-level data that is seamlessly incorporated into their work p...

To provide coordinated care that meets patients’ needs, many communities are developing information systems to share data across clinical and social service settings. In order for these systems to be effective in connecting patients to the right services at the right time, care teams need to adjust their workflows to incorporate this new data into their current practice, often at several different organizations. Introducing new technologies or procedures into established workflows can pre...

What is 500 Cities? You may know that the secret to a healthier city is sharing data, but you have also probably discovered that finding and collecting data can be very challenging, particularly at the community level. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the CDC Foundation, recently released a wealth of data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Using a multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) ap...

At a recent HealthDoers Peer-to-Peer Event, 75+ stakeholders met to discuss promising approaches for combining social determinants of health (SDOH) data with traditional health care data. Kelly Cronin, MPH, director of the Office of Care Transformation at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Niall Brennan, former chief data officer at the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), provided a national-level perspective on the role of SD...

To be effective and strategic in their decision-making, city leaders striving to build a culture of health need diverse, usable, high-quality data sources that are integrated, timely, relevant and geographically precise. This post was co-authored by Peter Eckart, Alison Rein and Nick Wallace. Data can be a powerful tool for understanding issues, making smarter decisions, and improving results – and city leaders can help build a culture of health by supporting the collection, access and u...