Modernizing Environmental Public Health Tracking to Advance Environmental Health Surveillance in Vermont - The purpose of the Vermont Environmental Public Health Tracking Program is to enhance and maintain a modern system of integrated health and environmental data and to utilize data to support actions that improve the health of our communities and reduce health disparities. The program aims to build environmental health surveillance capacity to bolster efforts to protect and promote public health and health equity, prevent disease, and reduce or eliminate environmental risks through data utilization, outreach and education, collaborative public health actions, and evidence-based policy. The Tracking Program supports more than 30 dynamic health and environmental data reports on the Vermont Tracking Portal (https://www.healthvermont.gov/tracking), including more than 200 distinct measures and indicators. Enhancements during the performance period include improving report design, leveraging APIs, automating data loading processes, and incorporating real-time syndromic surveillance data. The Tracking Program will also replace the underlying technology of the Health Department’s Public Health Data Explorer (https://apps.health.vermont.gov/ias/querytool), which is used to navigate to different departmental data resources. Modernization of the Tracking Portal, Data Explorer, data visualization platform, and the IT processes that support them will increase capacity to make more data available at the subcounty level, provide more frequent updates, advance automated trend and significant event detection, and stratify data to provide insight into disproportionate exposure and health impacts. Providing data that allow users to clearly identify health disparities (e.g., in birth defects, cancer rates, heat-related illness, lead poisoning) in a timely fashion will be critical for decisions about public and private investments in health care access, housing, education, transportation, energy infrastructure, disaster preparedness, resilience, and a clean environment. During the performance period, the Vermont Tracking program will focus on the environmental health concerns of rural Vermonters and BIPOC Vermonters. Analyzing data by rural vs. urban status and race/ethnicity will allow us to call attention to inequitable exposures to environmental health hazards and negative health outcomes, a first step towards addressing and eliminating health disparities. We will use this data, in collaboration with our stakeholders, to direct messaging, and implement programs to address the upstream causes of the health disparities we identify. Program outcomes include: improved environmental health surveillance data; increased surveillance of environmental health disparities; improved information technology tools and systems; increased collaboration with stakeholders to reduce health disparities; improved Tracking Portal functionality and utilization; reduced exposures to environmental toxins; reduced environmentally-attributable adverse health outcomes, and reduced environmental health disparities. The Tracking Program will publish performance measures associated with each outcome and be held accountable for progress towards program outcomes by an internal Technical Advisory Group and an external stakeholder group. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated what the public health workforce is capable of when working in concert and demonstrated the power and limitations of real-time data to drive actions that protect the public’s health. It also made plain which communities have been left unprotected, and the urgency needed to extend public health resources to everyone. The Tracking Program will apply these lessons – in our work with data stewards to ensure that health disparities can be detected, and in our work with community partners from disproportionately impacted populations to ensure that they see themselves represented in the data and are fully engaged in public health actions to reduce or eliminate environmental health disparities.
