CDC-RFA-PW24-0080 Strengthening Public Health Systems and Services through National Partnerships to Improve and Protect the Nation's Health - The global COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to longstanding public health challenges, including workforce declines, fragmented programs, siloed health systems and lagging technology in public health systems across the US. The public health infrastructure continues to suffer from strain and resource gaps. The pandemic underscored the need for public health data, infrastructure and workforce to support a more timely, efficient, effective and equitable response to the next national emergency or global pandemic. The pandemic also revealed the critical need to upskill the public health workforce in informatics. To address ongoing health disparities, promote equity in healthcare and address emerging health threats, today’s public health workforce must be able to effectively use information to conduct public health surveillance, influence policy and communicate within multiple information channels to promote health, reduce health inequities and respond quickly to health threats. The Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII) proposes to draw upon its 32 years of public health informatics expertise and experience in deploying strategic partnerships to strengthen public health systems and services to support ongoing CDC priorities to build capacity in STLT agencies and reinforce public health infrastructure. This proposal is a Category B: Workforce Segments in Governmental Public Health Departments application. The workforce segment is public health informaticians, those with formal titles and roles as public health informaticians or those with an acknowledged role in guiding or implementing informatics activities within STLT agencies. PHII proposes to: a) enhance the knowledge base, skills and tools required by the public health informatics workforce to meet the evolving challenges to population health; b) enhance the skills of public health informaticians and other leaders to build and maintain strategic, structured and cross-sector partnerships to bring about collective impact; and c) enhance the ability of public health informaticians, public health leaders and practitioners to harness the power of existing and new types of information and IT to improve population health and address health disparities. The proposed activities have been designed in collaboration with STLT practitioners nationwide in all 10 HHS regions. The activities will, in the long term, improve organizational and systems capacity to address equity-focused public health priorities, improve the effectiveness of organizational and systems infrastructure and performance, improve health outcomes, and reduce health inequities. These long-term outcomes align well with PHII’s vision for every public health jurisdiction to have the capacity to access, use and share timely information to protect and improve the health of its people.
