Designing a Successful Practice-Based Research Network in Public Health: Key Concepts

Successful public health practice-based research networks (PBRNs) will require organizational, financial, and intellectual resources that allow practitioners and researchers to mount relevant studies in real-world public health settings. This brief outlines characteristics likely to be important to the success of public health PBRNs, based on the experience of PBRNs in other practice setting

Editorial Comment: A Method for Identifying Positive Deviant Local Health Departments in Maternal and Child Health

Improving the well-being of mothers, infants, and children is a vital public health initiative in the United States. Local health departments are designated agents for addressing maternal and child health outcomes. Klaiman and colleagues used a positive deviant (PD) framework in identifying the modifiable activities and approaches for LHDs that contribute to better MCH outcomes

Editorial Comment: Understanding Cost Variation in STD Service Delivery as State and Federal Agencies Reduce Funding

As health reform gains momentum, many changes have been seen in the way health services are delivered and financed. In an attempt to address the uncertainties and understand the costs of delivering STD prevention services, the authors examined the cost of STDs in a highly centralized public health agency system (PHAS). This commentary covers several implications that arise from this study

Public health system partnerships and the scope of maternal and child services: a longitudinal study

Local health departments (LHDs) struggle to serve their communities in the face of ongoing fiscal constraints. Fiscal constraints have led to the elimination and reduction of maternal and child health services (MCH). LHDs have used various strategies to minimize the negative impact fiscal constraints of elimination or reduction of services provided to their communities. Many LHDs have used strategies such as developing partnerships. While these strategies are assumed to increase the delivery of services and improve outcomes, there is limited research on the type of partnerships needed to service delivery. Our interest was identifying the type of partnerships associated with an increase in MCH service delivery. We found that our method for identifying partnership types was effective, and that partnerships types are associated with the delivery of maternal and child services. The next step in our work is to conduct in-depth analysis with LHDs to understand the partnership characteristics and MCH services and practices they use to increase service delivery and achieve exceptional health outcomes

The Role of the Community Health Delivery System in the Health and Well-Being of Justice-Involved Women: A Narrative Review

Background: Over seven million imprisoned and jailed women are released into the community each year and many are ill-equipped to meet the challenges of re-integration. Upon release into their community, women are faced with uncertain barriers and challenges using community services to improve their health and well-being and reuniting with families. Few studies have identified and described the barriers of the community health delivery system (CHDS)- a complex set of social, justice, and healthcare organizations that provide community services aimed to improve the health and well-being (i.e. safety, health, the success of integration, and life satisfaction) of justice-involved women. We conducted a narrative review of peer-reviewed and gray literature to identify and describe the CHDS and the CHDS service delivery. Results: Peer-reviewed and gray literature (n = 82) describing the CHDS organizations’ missions, incentives, goals, and services were coded in three domains, justice, social, and healthcare, to examine their service delivery to justice-involved women and their efforts to improve the health and well-being of justice-involved women. Conclusions: We found that the CHDS is fragmented, identified gaps in knowledge about the CHDS that serves justice-involved women, and offer recommendations to reduce fragmentation and integrate service delivery aimed to improve the health and well-being of justice-involved women

Finding Order in Complexity: A Typology of Local Public Health Delivery Systems

Public health decision-makers and researchers currently lack an evidence-based framework for describing, classifying, and comparing public health delivery systems based on their organizational components, operational characteristics, and division of responsibility. Related typologies developed in the health services sector have proven extremely valuable for policy and administrative decision-making as well as for ongoing research. Performance assessment, quality improvement, and accreditation activities are now blossoming in public health—adding urgency to the need for classification and comparison frameworks. This brief describes a newly-developed empirical typology for local public health systems and highlights its policy and managerial applications

Opportunities for Comparative Research in Public Health PBRNs : A Baseline Analysis of Local Practice Settings

This analysis describes the organizational and operational characteristics of local public health agencies participating in an initial cohort of five (5) public health PBRNs in the U.S. We examine variation in practice settings within and between PBRNs; compare practice settings to state and national norms; and identify opportunities for comparative research that can be conducted through PBRNs

Reducing Cancer Disparities through Community Engagement in Policy Development: The Role of Cancer Councils

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S and a source of large racial and ethnic disparities in population health. Policy development is a powerful but sometimes overlooked public health tool for reducing cancer burden and disparities. Along with other partners in the public health system, community-based organizations such as local cancer councils can play valuable roles in developing policies that are responsive to community needs and in mobilizing resources to support policy adoption and implementation. This paper examines the current and potential roles played by local cancer councils to reduce cancer burden and disparities. Responsive public health systems require vehicles for communities to engage in policy development. Cancer councils provide promising models of engagement. Untapped opportunities exist for enhancing policy development through cancer councils, such as expanding targets of engagement to include private-sector stakeholders and expanding methods of engagement utilizing the Affordable Care Act’s Prevention and Public Health Fund

Moving beyond silos: How do we provide distributed personalized medicine to pregnant women everywhere at scale? Insights from PRE-EMPT.

While we believe that pre-eclampsia matters-because it remains a leading cause of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality worldwide-we are convinced that the time has come to look beyond single clinical entities (e.g. pre-eclampsia, postpartum hemorrhage, obstetric sepsis) and to look for an integrated approach that will provide evidence-based personalized care to women wherever they encounter the health system. Accurate outcome prediction models are a powerful way to identify individuals at incrementally increased (and decreased) risks associated with a given condition. Integrating models with decision algorithms into mobile health (mHealth) applications could support community and first level facility healthcare providers to identify those women, fetuses, and newborns most at need of facility-based care, and to initiate lifesaving interventions in their communities prior to transportation. In our opinion, this offers the greatest opportunity to provide distributed individualized care at scale, and soon