Generate Health (FLOURISH’s backbone organization) has been selected by Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to participate in a new initiative called CIC-START (Community Impact Contracts – Strategic, Timely, Actionable, Replicable, Targeted). The initiative helps public health initiatives working to reduce health disparities operate more effectively through data sharing.
“Everyone deserves the opportunity to lead a healthy life, but to achieve this vision we need to shift our approach by moving beyond the health care sector and analyzing data on social, economic, and environmental factors that influence health,” says DASH Co-Director Clare Tanner at the Michigan Public Health Institute. “We hope that DASH CIC-START helps local collaborations take significant steps toward aligning multi-sector partners around data-driven approaches that promote health equity.”
Generate Health, in partnership with the St. Louis Regional Data Alliance, is part of a cohort of 16 other CIC-START awardees. Each chosen project will receive $25,000 to execute a plan that builds their capacity to share and use multi-sector data to improve community health. Generate Health and the St. Louis Regional Data Alliance have begun working together to change how maternal and infant health data are collected and used in the St. Louis region.
Generate Health’s project will engage funders, hospitals, community organizations and other multi-sector partners to standardize metrics related to safe sleep and portable crib distribution, in order to build a shared measurement system across partners. FLOURISH identified the need for portable crib distribution and standard safe sleep education to reduce racial disparities in infant mortality. In St. Louis, Black infants are four times more likely to experience sleep-related deaths than White infants.
As a part of the DASH program, Generate Health is hosting engagement sessions in February and March to involve funders and service providers in the standardization of metrics related to safe sleep and portable crib distribution. Partners who provide portable cribs and/or safe sleep education can register to attend these sessions online.
“This project will help partners coordinate the region’s portable crib network,” said Sarah Kennedy, manager, epidemiology and data analysis, at Generate Health. “This pilot project will help partners better align their data, so we are measuring the region’s safe sleep needs and the impact of the portable crib program consistently. By understanding our data and what it’s telling us, we’ll be one step closer to reducing the number of safe sleep deaths for Black babies in St. Louis.”