Wednesday, April 2, 2025
4/2/2025
Enhancing Innovation and Capabilities of the Environmental Public Health Tracking Network - The Massachusetts Environmental Public Health Tracking (MA EPHT) Program has established a firm foundation for providing timely health and environmental data to residents, public health partners, and other stakeholders at the community level. Reliable, granular data are necessary for making information-driven public health decisions. The environmental health needs of Massachusetts residents are diverse, with many populations experiencing disproportionate impacts of environmental hazards. Therefore, decisions that drive public health actions aimed at eliminating these environmental health inequities must be based on robust local health and environmental data. The MA EPHT Program has been successful in building an increasingly modernized portal to enhance accessibility of these data. We have built strong relationships with state and local partners to gather feedback for program evaluation that drives continuous improvement. Because MA EPHT's audience has broad needs and technical capabilities, we have worked to offer a variety of tools, such as user-defined map-centric queries, quick-access interactive summary widgets, and contextualized multi-dataset reports and data stories. MA EPHT proposes to continue to modernize our public portal with enhanced data visualizations and non-traditional data sources that builds public health workforce capacity in environmental health and supports information-driven decision-making. With continued understanding of stakeholder needs, tailored communication strategies, and expanded collaborations to streamline data sharing, we will promote and support the implementation of more evidence-based initiatives for reducing environmental health disparities. MA EPHT will work towards the following outcomes during this period of performance: 1. Increased data monitoring of environmental health topics (short-term) 2. Improved completeness, timeliness, and quality of EPHT surveillance data (short-term) 3. Increased surveillance of environmental health disparities (short-term) 4. Improved information technology tools and systems (short-term) 5. Increased stakeholder inclusion in data sharing, communication, and response (short-term) 6. Increased collaboration with stakeholders to reduce health disparities (short-term) 7. Increased dissemination of environmental health information using communication best practices to appropriate audiences (short-term) 8. Increased knowledge/ability among EPHT workforce (short-term) 9. Increased recipient capacity to provide technical assistance to advance environmental public health interventions (short-term) 10. Improved completeness, timeliness, and quality of evaluation data (short-term) 11. Increased use of public health data among public health practitioners and environmental professionals to develop and deliver informed programs, prioritized interventions, and policies to address environmental public health issues (intermediate) 12. Improved identification, monitoring, and addressing of health disparities (intermediate) 13. Reduced environmental exposures and related health effects (long-term) 14. Reduced environmental health disparities (long-term)
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).