Public Health and Community Leaders from Across the Nation Will Convene in Baltimore This Week to Advance Plans for Sharing Multi-Sector Data to Improve Community Health

BALTIMORE, Oct. 15, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The importance of sharing data across sectors to improve community health will take center stage this week as more than 350 public health and community leaders convene in Baltimore for the third annual All In: Data for Community Health national meeting. Leaders from more than 150 communities across the nation will be on hand during the three-day event to explore ways to improve population health by unleashing the full potential of their data through partnerships that bring diverse sectors together.

Launched in 2016, All In: Data for Community Health is a learning network of communities testing exciting new ways to systematically improve community health outcomes through multi-sector partnerships working to share data. To accelerate learning among early innovators in the field, the All In learning network is currently led by six national and regional programs: BUILD Health Challenge, Data Across Sectors for Health, Network for Public Health Law, New Jersey Health Initiatives, Population Health Innovation Lab, and the Public Health National Center for Innovations (PHNCI). Additionally, All In brings together more than 150 community-based, multi-sector coalitions from across the nation that are actively engaged in planning, building or using shared data systems. All In partner networks are building the evidence base to advance practice, identify gaps, highlight investment needs, and inform policy.

Developing data systems that combine health care and public health datasets with data from other sectors can help community leaders acquire a more complete picture of factors that impact community health outcomes. Access to multi-sector data increases their capacity to implement more effective programs, policies, and system-wide changes and also leads to better care coordination across sectors for those with complex health and social needs.

"There is broad agreement that, if we want to make individuals and communities healthier, we need to expand our lens beyond health care to involve other sectors such as housing, community development, education, transportation, and criminal justice," said Peter Eckart, Co-Director, DASH. "Data from these sources can provide new ways of understanding the forces working for and against health in a community, and increase the capacity of community members, elected officials and other local leaders to plan, develop and support programs and policies that optimize health and well-being."

The third annual All In national meeting will kick off at 1 p.m. ET today with an interactive opening plenary designed to engage attendees in their common vision of building capacity to address the social determinants of health through multi-sector data-sharing collaborations. From interactive deep-dive sessions to round-table discussions, workshops, and break-out sessions, the meeting will provide many opportunities to discover new data-sharing solutions and gain practical guidance from experts. Crowdsourcing and live polling will be used throughout the meeting to garner feedback and input from attendees in real time.

The program continues on Wednesday, Oct. 16 with a morning plenary led by Rhea Boyd, MD, MPH, FAAP, Commonwealth Fund Mongan Minority Health Policy Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. With a specific focus on anti-racism, the plenary will explore the ethical implications of public data-sharing and its impacts on power, vulnerability, accountability, and racial inequality. Also on Oct. 16, the Georgia Health Policy Center will host an "Aligning Systems for Health" lunch to discuss the learning system they are developing. Another highlight of the day will feature the launch of the new All In Affinity Groups, which will provide opportunities to deepen the conversation on popular topics both during the meeting and through continued programming afterwards.

Sessions, presentations and networking opportunities will continue on Thursday, Oct. 17, beginning with a plenary panel titled "Strategies for the Win-Win in Accessing Data: Stories from the Field." Recognizing that a fair amount of tension exists across state agencies in governance and data sharing, the plenary panel will address the state-local relationship and push-pull around data-sharing to improve community health.

Since 2016, All In partners and their funded community collaborations have been testing innovative multi-sector data-sharing projects. An overview of the now more than 150 community projects across the United States is available here.

"There is no roadmap for this complex work," said Jessica Solomon Fisher, Chief Innovations Officer for PHNCI. "If we want to make progress in this field together, it's critical that communities share their experiences so that collectively, we can learn from each other's failures and successes. All In helps bring to scale the hard-won knowledge and practical lessons learned from communities to accelerate progress toward improved health for all."

For more information about All In: Data for Community Health, visit https://www.allindata.org/ or call Josh Gryniewicz at (312) 850-4744.

About All In
All In: Data for Community Health is a nationwide learning collaborative that helps communities build capacity to address the social determinants of health through multi-sector data sharing collaborations. All In partner networks are building the evidence base to advance practice, identify gaps, highlight investment needs, and inform policy.

SOURCE Public Health National Center for Innovations