Strengthening US public health infrastructure, workforce, and datasystems - the georgia department of public health (DPH) is applying for all three component a strategies of the CDC strengthening US…

Strengthening US public health infrastructure, workforce, and datasystems - the georgia department of public health (DPH) is applying for all three component a strategies of the CDC strengthening US public health workforce grant. DPH, established under law in 2011, works with 18 health districts statewide. (the fulton county board of health is not included in the application for A1 funding as the city of atlanta's population exceeds 400,000.) the health districts range in size from a population of just under 1 million persons to over 3,000,000 persons and include from one to 16 counties. The health district offices provide administrative support and program technical assistance to the county health departments in the district. The county health departments provide direct "rubber meets the road" clinical, environmental, and health promotion services. During the past 2 1/2 years since the onset of covid-19, DPH and the local health departments have received substantial funding through the workforce and health equity grants that have enabled them to address major issues. We anticipate that these grants will expire in 2024 and need to extend activities beyond that date to at least 2027 when the strengthening public health grant project ends. There are also several programmatic and administrative areas within public health that require support beyond those now supported through those two grants. Through component a/STRATEGY1, DPH is requesting funding to both address current gaps and retain staff. At the local level, through grant-in-aid agreements, at least 50% of the funding will be used for health equity activities. Information technology (IT) and informatics have become critical core aspects of public health for both internal administrative and programmatic units as well as external partners. Data that are collected underlie improved service delivery and reporting leading to more accurate, timely and better decision making. The data can also be transformed into analytics that support decision making, provide transparency, and enable external partners and the public to obtain services and information. Over a 5-year project period, component a/strategy 2 will be focused on totally overhauling DPH's local health department electronic health record (EHR) system that was first implemented in the mid-1990S. The benefits achieved at the local level will multiply in their impact with aggregation and analysis at the state level. Component a/strategy 3, data modernization, will focus at the state level with DPH IT/informatics improving systems core and foundational to DPH operations. Examples of this include retaining key infrastructure and IT/informatics staff and skill sets developed during the covid-19 response, establishing a centralized data system, continuing enhancements to core systems (IE. Surveillance, lims, gavers), and continuing the move to the cloud.