New Hampshire Environmental Public Health Tracking Program: Supporting environmental health surveillance, identifying health disparities, and building health equity. - The purpose of the NH EPHT Program is to support evidence based environmental public health actions at the state and local level by enhancing current environmental health surveillance activities, designing IT solutions, leveraging partnerships, disseminating data stories, and evaluating opportunities for quality improvement. For this Project Period, NH EPHT separates activities into Services and Projects. Activities will support environmental health surveillance, enhance information technology, build partnerships, promote outreach, sustain program capacity, and bolster program evaluation. We will launch a Children’s Environmental Health Initiative (CEHI) to ensure our work is based on a systematic approach to environmental health. The CEHI will focus on places where children live, learn, and play such as their homes, schools, and communities. This will necessitate focusing on families and the places they spend time, such as their homes and workplaces. This approach will leverage existing connections with programs, agencies, and service providers that serve those most disproportionately affected by environmental exposures and adverse health outcomes. The CEHI will integrate data across environmental health topic areas at the community scale. We will create customized data briefs and interactive maps for topics including Lead, Asthma, and Well Water Quality. These new products will help identify high-risk areas and at-risk populations that may be disproportionately affected by environmental exposures and related health outcomes. We will utilize an inclusive stakeholder engagement process to improve data visualization and portal functionality; this work will better highlight the relationship between social determinants, environmental exposures, and health outcomes. We are committed to generating datasets that support small area analysis for comparison of risks across space, time, and demographics. We will also incorporate feedback through Focus Groups, Trainings, and User Feedback Surveys. This will enable development of interventions focused on supporting vulnerable populations and alleviating health disparities. This will allow us to execute the required activities and meet project outcomes with a comprehensive suite of services and products tailored to meet the needs of NH’s Public Health System, including NH’s 13 Regional Public Health Networks (RPHNs), two local health departments (LHDs), and non-traditional partners including academic partners, regional planners and healthcare providers. In addition to the CEHI, under Component A, NH EPHT will complete a number of other projects including: maintain Data Portal, enhance Tracking Program through partnerships, build foundational data components utilizing 2020 Census data, support strategic planning, integrate lead poisoning prevention data to support interventions, and create an environmental health services database. For Component B, NH EPHT will engage on a number of collaborative projects that will identify overarching strategies to conduct innovative environmental health surveillance that utilize new data sources and leverage partnerships across the public health system. For Component C, NH EPHT will work closely with the Bureau of Public Health Statistics and Informatics to support the NH DHHS Data Portal. This work builds on the Department-wide Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) Platform, an Oracle-based system that links to R Studio and Tableau, and includes a Data Warehouse and Data Dashboards. The NH EPHT Program is committed to building environmental health capacity. We will work collaboratively with partners to address health disparities and reach those most disproportionately affected by adverse environmental exposures and related health outcomes. We will continue to provide key services and technical assistance to partners. The core services and analytical capacity enables data driven decision making that informs public health action across the State.
