Mapping Public Health Need vs. Workforce Capacity: Colorado Uses Geospatial Analysis to Work Smarter
Success StoriesSteve Holloway, Director at the Colorado Department of Public Health, explains how his agency leveraged PHIG, alongside other funding sources, to establish a modern data architecture and a geospatial analysis framework. This framework helps the agency better understand health needs and public health capacity at the local level by combining multiple datasets and making it clear where these data are coming from, from a geographic perspective. The analysis they’re doing now doesn’t just show the current workforce and clinical capacity within a specific community – it will also reveal how differences in local public health and safety net services correlate with that community’s health.
The maps resulting from geospatial analysis help public health agencies and Colorado residents better understand health needs and resources at the community level, supporting better decision-making. For example, knowing workforce capacity in areas with high-risk pregnancies helps agencies invest strategically in training, staffing, and programs to better meet local needs. Holloway emphasizes that using this kind of data-informed approach strengthens his agency’s ability to serve communities effectively and use resources efficiently.
Video Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
How have you been able to use PHIG funding?
So, our part of the Public Health Infrastructure Grant really allowed us to do a deeper analysis of the public health workforce to better understand local capacity that could then be applied to other geospatial analyses that we were doing with the support of other funding structures. So we could determine which communities would most benefit from improved access to clinical services or interventions that improved healthy pregnancies, healthy aging, healthy children, and vaccination.
What is geospatial analysis?
Geospatial analysis is coloring maps with data. A member of the public looks at a map, and they can recognize their communities – they can recognize things around them. And then, when we color those maps with data that tells a story about health status or the capacity of public health agencies to address community-level needs, it allows people to use something that is familiar to them to draw important conclusions about ways in which we can become healthier as a community through investment in public health.
What is the impact of these new data analysis tools?
Geospatial analysis allows us to be more precise and more efficient with available resources. It’s a cliché that nearly everyone in public health knows that we need to look upstream before we can solve existing, urgent, acute problems in the present. Understanding the origins of health concerns allows us to be more specific about how we can reduce them downstream.
The analysis that we’re doing now will not only present the current picture of workforce needs for public health and clinical health at the community level, but because we’ve collected data over time and into the future, we’ll be able to see the direct health impacts of variations in local public health capacity and in local safety net clinical capacity in terms of its effects on overall health status in the community. It should very quickly reveal the value of those investments through the health data, and perhaps encourage more thoughtful prevention-oriented policy.
How are you using data to make better decisions?
So we haven’t got there yet, but this infrastructure allows us a data architecture and a geospatial analysis framework that will allow us to do really important longitudinal studies of health status and health risk at the community level. We should be able to correlate that with important vital statistics data and, most essentially to the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, the infrastructure of local public health agencies, including the workforce in those communities that are there to address those needs.
So, for example, if we understand something about the public health workforce in a community that has high-risk pregnancies, we can invest in the education and expertise of that local workforce to really help them target their interventions and hire the right staff to meet those community-level needs.
Why is funding of this kind worth it?
Public health needs the investment to bring our technology and expertise to be on par with what is available in the general private sector system. And the results that public health can generate with access to those resources will far surpass what we might see in the private sector. The strategies available to reduce that gap are clear in the evidence. We simply need the tools to be able to invest strategically and precisely.