In September 2000, the Pew Environmental Health Commission issued a report entitled America’s Environmental Health Gap:
Why the Country Needs a Nationwide Health Tracking Network.

In this report, the Commission documented that the existing environmental health systems were inadequate

credit: TRB Blogs

and fragmented and recommended a “Nationwide Health Tracking Network for disease and exposures.” In response to the report, Congress appropriated funds in the fiscal year 2002’s budget for the CDC to establish National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program and Tracking Network and has appropriated funds each year thereafter to continue this effort.

Environmental Public Health Tracking Network (Tracking Network) is the integrated surveillance of health, exposure, and hazard information and data from a variety of national, state, and local sources.

The Tracking Network is unique in that it provides the United States with accurate and timely standardized data and supports ongoing efforts within the public health and environmental sectors to improve data collection, accessibility, and dissemination as well as analytic and response capacity.

Data that were previously collected for different purposes and stored in separate systems are now available in a nationally standardized format allowing programs to begin bridging the gap between health and the environment.

Having accurate and timely tracking data enables public health authorities to determine temporal and spatial trends in disease and potential environmental exposures, identify populations most affected, and develop and assess the environmental public health policies and interventions aimed at reducing or eliminating diseases associated with environmental factors.

The availability of these types of data in a standardized network provide researchers, public health authorities, healthcare practitioners, and the public to have a better understanding about the possible associations between the environment and adverse health effects, and to assist them with decision making.

The approach of this NOFO is to assist in addressing the above mentioned data issues by facilitating access to existing statewide electronic hospital discharge and emergency department data and reducing barriers to access this data.

This NOFO builds on the efforts from CDC-RFA-EH15-1502 to continue to facilitate data sharing between states, improve data timeliness, and to assist with the development of standards and principles to effectively administer and integrate public health data into the Tracking Network.

An example lesson learned from the previous NOFO was the creation of the state data agency profiles that provide information on the agency responsible for collecting hospital data in each state including, the name and type of agency, if they collect data under a mandate or voluntarily (links to the laws), the data systems they maintain, and a link to the agency website and reports.