Reporting on 'third generation' sources of public health surveillance data to guide public health practice during and beyond the pandemic

The Foundation's initiative, Transforming Public Health Data Systems to Advance Health Equity, was designed to fund national analyses and timely, short-term grantmaking to inform an expert panel that will recommend a comprehensive approach to support the transformation of data-related policies and practices in public health and health-related sectors to improve health equity, as well as recommend directions for RWJF's future strategic funding in this area. This project will review current research efforts exploring the relationship between environmental measures and COVID-19 spread in order to provide guidance on how timely and geographically detailed data can be created to guide future environmental surveillance and response in public health practice. Specifically, it will examine new data sources and approaches that are emerging that actualize the promise of "big data" to generate nimble and actionable public health data products and improve spatial granularity and flexibility. The results will provide critical information on the future of environmental data to a RWJF national commission on the future of public health that will meet in spring 2021. Deliverables will include a white paper report that will be made available to the commission; a manuscript for a peer-reviewed, open-access publication; a new, neighborhood-level measure relevant to climate change and health that will be disseminated via GitHub and other data-dissemination websites; and a new neighborhood-level measure relevant to economic recovery and health that will also be disseminated via GitHub and other data-dissemination websites.