How Massachusetts Is Getting More Complete Public Health Data — At Half the Cost
Success StoriesThe Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) is using the Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) to rethink and restructure how it collects, shares, and uses data—not just within individual programs, but across the entire department. Through PHIG, MDPH built a dedicated Data Modernization team and stood up a centralized, cloud-based platform to bring all their data into one place, giving epidemiologists and analysts a more complete picture of the communities they serve.
But the work didn’t stop at standing up the platform. The team made a strategic shift: transitioning from an external vendor to an internal support model that does everything the vendor did and more, but at roughly half the cost. What would have run $3.5–$4 million a year through a vendor now costs significantly less, with the added benefit of building long-term sustainability and capacity within the department. Rebecca White, Data Strategy Portfolio and Project Manager at MDPH, explains why all of this matters beyond the bottom line: data centralization isn’t just about improving efficiency, it’s about seeing people more fully. As she puts it, data are not people, but by bringing all the data about people into one place, public health professionals can build a more holistic picture of what a Massachusetts resident’s life looks like and make better decisions about how the health department can support their health and wellness.
Video Transcript
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
How are you modernizing your data systems?
Data modernization at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health involves:
- Understanding what data we actually have and hold in the department;
- Centralizing it as best as we can into one place, and bringing the epidemiologists and the data analysts into that centralized platform so they can review the data; then
- Use the data in a more holistic way to gather insights into our communities and various populations in Massachusetts.
PHIG was a crucial part of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s data modernization journey. It added some focus for the department on how we should center data modernization as core public health infrastructure. It helped us see that it’s not about specific disease areas or topics – everything touches data. And since everything touches data, we should look at it from a wider lens and determine how we can provide a department-wide strategy to use and disseminate data.
Another way that PHIG supported our data modernization efforts was by creating the space and the funds for us to build our own DMI team. We have a dedicated team for the department that’s all about data modernization, and every day we are looking for new opportunities to move forward our strategic priority around data.
How is this driving efficiencies and cost-savings?
So when PHIG first started out, we used the funds to help stand up the platform – our cloud-based platform. We were able to get it up quickly after doing an assessment by using a vendor who was able to come in and provided the full suite of capabilities that we needed in order to get this started. They were our technical partners, as well as our platform administration and management partners and support partners. But pretty quickly, we realized that it was going to be a very expensive endeavor if we continued down that road long-term.
We’ve now switched to an internally-based or internally-supported model where we are now funding a data team within our umbrella agency who provides our IT support who directly supports our team. These are 10 dedicated individuals who are able to do everything that the vendor was able to do and more. By switching to this internally based platform, we’re building long-term sustainability and capacity, as well as realizing significant cost savings to the tune of millions of dollars. Through our vendor-supported model, we estimate that we would have spent around $3.5-$4 million a year. After switching to an internally supported model, our cost will be about half that.
Why is this work so important?
Very high hopes for our data modernization journey impacting the lives of Massachusetts communities and populations. By bringing all of our data into one platform, we’re able to make it come to life a little bit more in a way that we weren’t able to before.
Data are not people. We try to use data to understand small facets of people’s lives. And by taking all of these pieces and bringing them together, we can at least create a more holistic picture of what a person and their life experience looks like. We can take these data to inform our actions to positively impact people’s health and lives.