Engaging academia to advance the science and practice of environmental public health tracking

Abstract

Public health agencies at the federal, state, and local level are responsible for implementing actions and policies that address health problems related to environmental hazards. These actions and policies can be informed by integrating or linking data on health, exposure, hazards, and population. The mission of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (Tracking Program) is to provide information from a nationwide network of integrated health, environmental hazard, and exposure data that drives actions to improve the health of communities. The Tracking Program and federal, state, and local partners collect, integrate, analyze, and disseminate data and information to inform environmental public health actions. However, many challenges exist regarding the availability and quality of data, the application of appropriate methods and tools to link data, and the state of the science needed to link and analyze health and environmental data. The Tracking Program has collaborated with academia to address key challenges in these areas. The collaboration has improved our understanding of the uses and limitations of available data and methods, expanded the use of existing data and methods, and increased our knowledge about the connections between health and environment. Valuable working relationships have been forged in this process, and together we have identified opportunities and improvements for future collaborations to further advance the science and practice of environmental public health tracking.

Born to be Wise: a population registry data linkage protocol to assess the impact of modifiable early-life environmental exposures on the health and development of children

“…Standard multilevel mixed models assume independence between clusters at a hierarchy level. The project will apply the multilevel Geographic and Multilevel Models for Environmental Public Health Indicators and Tracking (GAMEPHIT) software109–111 to deal with potential spatial autocorrelation in residual variation that is not accounted for by fixed predictors in the model. This software works with both continuous and dichotomous outcomes.…”