Planning and Capacity Building Activities
| Grantee: | Oregon Department of Public Health and Human Services |
|---|---|
| Contact: | Michael A. Heumann, MPH, MA |
| Telephone: | 503-731-4573 |
| E-mail: | Michael.A.Heumann@state.or.us |
| Address: | Oregon Department of Public Health & Human Services, EOE 800 NE Oregon Street, Suite 772 Portland, OR 97232 |
| Web site: | http://oregon.gov/DHS/ph/epht/index.shtml [external link] |
| Funded Since: | September 30, 2002 |
| Funded Program: | National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, Part A |
Program Description:
Oregon aims to increase environmental public health capacity at the state and local levels and increase awareness of environmental health issues; build a diverse and effective planning consortium to prioritize environmental health needs and concerns and collaboratively develop standard indicators to measure hazards, exposures, and health outcomes; identify data, monitoring, and tracking systems, and develop or enhance tracking systems for priority indicators; and create an implementation plan and test the system for electronically linking data. The environmental public health tracking (EPHT) cooperative agreement will provide Oregon with the funds to leverage its existing environmental health infrastructure to link hazard, exposure, and health outcome data. The state is integrating activities for several of its current surveillance systems (blood lead levels, asthma surveillance, and pesticide illness surveillance). Also, the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) Team has integrated some of Oregon’s health-related data systems into a data warehouse called Outcome Assessment through Systems of Integrated Surveillance (OASIS). OASIS includes data from vital statistics, AIDS, hospital discharge, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), tuberculosis (TB), Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS), Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS).
EPHT program staff will assess the existing environmental public health capacity and needs of local health departments. Oregon also will review the training capacity for environmental public health at academic institutions (including the nearest Center of Excellence in Environmental Public Health Training), and professional organizations. It will create and distribute a comprehensive list of training resources, and develop a statewide environmental public health training improvement plan.
Proposed collaboration and data sharing with Washington State’s health department on electronic lab reporting and biomonitoring projects are being considered. This collaboration and data sharing will improve surveillance in both states, especially because citizens cross borders for health care.
Building on a wide range of existing partnerships, Oregon will recruit leaders and key stakeholders from environmental and public health entities; diverse ethnic, cultural, and geographic groups; tribal governments; advocacy organizations; and academic institutions to create a formal EPHT Planning Consortium. The consortium will use elements from the Protocol for Assessing Community Excellence in Environmental Health to identify and prioritize the environmental health concerns and needs in the state. EPHT staff will work with the consortium to develop strategies to ensure that data and information about the process and outcomes of the program are accessible and culturally appropriate. The expected benefits and lessons learned from the EPHT inventory will be widely disseminated to increase awareness of environmental health issues and state priorities.
EPHT staff will collaborate with other participating states and the CDC on setting data standards for a national tracking network. EPHT will work with the nearest Center of Excellence to assess and incorporate relevant environmental public health indicators into the Oregon EPHT implementation plan.
The Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology Section will strengthen and formalize its collaboration with the Department of Environmental Quality. Representatives of these agencies and other partner organizations will form a technical team to develop appropriate architecture standards and data structures for EPHT to integrate data from various sources, while maintaining data security and confidentiality.
With the consortium, EPHT will develop, implement, and test data linkages in the EPHT system. Oregon will support partners for pilot data integration projects addressing priority indicators, and use the results to refine the implementation plan. Finally, Oregon will develop and carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the EPHT process and outcomes and widely disseminate the findings to inform partners and other state programs. Experiences of other states also will be incorporated into the final implementation plan for EPHT in Oregon.
