Environmental Public Health Tracking: Facilitating a New Era of Partnerships, Capacity Building, and Data Sharing

Beth Resnick, MPH

The Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) program constitutes a significant national investment in environmental public health.  EPHT advances provide an important contribution not only to environmental public health, but to overall public health infrastructure and public health approaches and practices.

In order to evaluate the impact of the EPHT program a questionnaire was administered by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health investigators with state and local EPHT tracking grantees. The questionnaire, approved by the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board, focused on changes in surveillance capacity, partnerships, and data access, analysis, and dissemination since the initiation of the EPHT program in 2002.

This presentation will highlight study results of quantifiable measures of EPHT progress in areas such as new and enhanced partnerships, improved capacity for surveillance, and increased data access, analysis and dissemination, Specific focus will be on the impact of these advances on the national EPH infrastructure and the capacity to track environmental hazards, exposures, and health.

Funding, continued data access, and translation to prevention activities are critical to sustaining this EPHT progress and developing the evidence base for assessing the longer term impacts and efficacy of EPHT and related environmental health improvements.