CDC Environmental Public Health Tracking Program Partnership with NAPHSIS

What is Environmental Public Health Tracking?
Environmental Public Health Tracking (Tracking) is the integrated surveillance of health, exposure, and hazard information and data from a variety of national, state, and local sources. These systems are critical in preventing and controlling disease in populations. Having accurate and timely tracking data permits public health authorities to determine temporal and spatial trends in disease and potential environmental exposures, identify populations most affected, and develop and assess the effectiveness of policy and environmental public health interventions. Tracking involves the utilization of data and information regarding health outcomes, environmental hazards, and human exposures, or a combination of them, and provides important information for public health practice. The availability of these types of data in a standardized network will enable researchers, public health authorities, healthcare practitioners, and the public to have a better understanding about the possible associations between the environment and adverse health effects.

What is the National Tracking Network?
A key characteristic of Tracking is the emphasis on data integration across health, human exposure, and hazard information systems. The National Tracking Network (Tracking Network) provides the United States with standardized data from multiple health, exposure, and hazard information systems that includes linkage of these data as part of regular tracking activities. The Tracking Network builds on separate ongoing efforts within the public health and environmental sectors to improve health tracking, hazard monitoring, and response capacity. Development of the Tracking Network depends on the availability, quality, timeliness, compatibility, and utility of existing hazard, exposure, and health outcome data.

The major functions of the Tracking Network are to:
• Enable compilation of a core set of nationally consistent health and environmental data and measures
• Discover, describe, exchange, analyze, and manage data
• Make tools available for managing and analyzing the data
• Provide environmental public health information to the public
Building a network to carry out these functions requires that many individuals and organizations coordinate efforts to develop and integrate various components to make data and information more accessible and more usable. Currently, CDC’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (Tracking Program) funds 26 states/cities and works collaboratively with several prominent national partners to maintain and enhance the capabilities and reach of the Tracking Network.

The CDC Environmental Public Health Tracking Program and NAPHSIS
Since 2002, the CDC Tracking Program has developed workforce capacity to address the abovementioned issues and provided tools and infrastructure to support this workforce. Data that was previously disjointed is now available in a nationally standardized format (i.e., Tracking Network) allowing programs to begin bridging the gap between health and the environment.

This cooperative agreement will support the ongoing collaboration with the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS) to assist with the development of standards and principles to effectively administer or integrate public health statistics and information systems into the Tracking Network. NAPHSIS will market Tracking Program activities and products to promote greater collaboration among vital records, health statistics, and health information systems professionals in providing environmental and health data information to policy makers and the public.