Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH) has awarded five communities grants to participate in a 6-month pilot initiative designed to help local collaborations catalyze their efforts to share and use multi-sector data to improve community health.
DASH, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and led by the Illinois Public Health Institute in partnership with the Michigan Public Health Institute, calls this new effort CIC-START (Community Impact Contracts – Strategic, Timely, Actionable, Replicable, Targeted).
The five awardees selected are:
• All Chicago Making Homeless History, Chicago, IL; Refining Data Exchange Platform
• Children’s Optimal Health, Austin, TX; Community Data Ecosystem as a Vehicle for Care Integration: Developing and Testing of Shared Care Plans on a Patient-Controlled Platform
• HealthInfoNet, Portland, ME; Maine’s Homeless Health Information Planning Collaborative
• North Coast Health Improvement and Information Network, Eureka, CA; Building a System – New Partners, New Sectors, New Data
• Partners for Better Health, Ontario, CA; Healthy Ontario Health Equity Data Project.
Each awardee will receive up to $25,000 to execute a time-limited activity that builds their capacity to engage partners from multiple sectors in planning or implementing an integrated data system or designing health interventions based on shared data. In addition to funding for technical assistance, the awardees will also receive support to participate in All In: Data for Community Health—a learning collaborative of more than 60 communities across the country working to merge data from multiple sectors to better understand and address health challenges.
Being part of the All In learning collaborative was a prerequisite for receiving DASH CIC-START funding, and it is the primary mechanism by which awardees will learn from each other’s progress and leverage the experience of a broader network of community collaborations to support their work.
Awardees will participate in the All In online community, a virtual platform open to any local collaboration interested in connecting with other professionals engaging in initiatives to share data across sectors. Future DASH CIC-START funding to support technical assistance and peer-to-peer mentoring will be available in 2018 to active All In learning collaborative participants.
“The only way to grow the field of multi-sector data integration is for communities to share what they are learning,” said DASH Co-Director Peter Eckart at the Illinois Public Health Institute, in a statement. “That’s where All In comes in—we are providing a way for these early pioneers to spread the impact of their innovations beyond their communities by sharing their lessons and promising practices. We are thrilled to be able to make meaningful connections among the DASH CIC-START awardees and the wider All In network to accelerate learning.”
