855: PHIG Funding Breaks Down Silos

SUMMER JOHNSON: 

This is the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition for Tuesday, March 4, 2025. I'm Summer Johnson. Now, today's news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

This morning, we bring you another PHIG Impact Report. Twice a month, we'll bring you stories of success from the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, also known as PHIG, and how your colleagues across the nation are using it and PHIG's impact on the U.S. public health system. Today, we hear from Dr. Sarah Lyon-Callo. She's the state epidemiologist for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. She's also senior deputy director for public health administration.

Dr. Lyon-Callo, thank you for joining us this morning. To start off, let's talk about the impact PHIG has had on your department.

SARAH LYON-CALLO: 

PHIG dollars have been very important for both workforce and data modernization efforts at the state and local level in Michigan. Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, or MDHHS, has provided PHIG support to local health departments who have made use of these funds according to the needs of their specific communities. This might include staff training, engagement, retention, getting staff certified, or licenses on board to be able to increase their service profiles. Dollars have also been used for media outreach to increase service utilization and for mobile clinics or vehicles to enhance their ability to get out into the community. Local health departments have also made renovations, increasing the accessibility of their own facilities, and they've also been updating their electronic medical records or other technology or software upgrades for their specific needs. MDHHS itself has also been able to use these funds to develop core capacities. For example, we've been able to bring on a public health communications coordinator and a policy operations administrator, in addition to the other essential duties they perform, they were really important resources during mpox response, H5N1 response, in terms of providing coordination and some consistency to those responses.

JOHNSON: 

What's been different about PHIG funding than other sources of funding in the past?

LYON-CALLO: 

Fragmented and categorical funding in public health has led to siloed efforts, resulting in disparity in outcomes and service delivery across different regions of the state. PHIG funding has allowed Michigan to take a systems-wide approach, integrating our foundational capabilities into unified frameworks. The shift has enabled us to be more strategic with allocation of existing resources, and allows for greater consistency in public health services and alignment with community needs.

JOHNSON: 

We're talking about PHIG success, so what does your team say are some of the wins that were dependent on PHIG?

LYON-CALLO: 

There are so many wins that we could associate with PHIG. One of the most significant and perhaps most easily overlooked achievement has been breaking down of internal silos. Many of the positions and initiatives we have launched through PHIG allow us to think outside of our traditional, categorical public health perspectives. We've been able to incorporate training programs that allow us to enhance skills across the public health department and consider how investment in shared tools and technologies can connect our teams, there are now embedded feedback loops that ensure information doesn't sit with one part of public health or in one program area, and that we're really considering implications more broadly in public health around information sharing.

JOHNSON: 

Finally, public health leaders across the country are interested in different funding models for public health. What does sustainable public health funding really mean to doing the job every day?

LYON-CALLO: 

Public health has most often been funded categorically, and it shows in how we're organized, what we're able to work on, how we visualize our data outside of the department, and how we engage with the public. Sustainable public health funding enables us to transform to provide services for a whole person, a whole family, a whole community, rather than thinking about a single disease state, a particular communicable disease outbreak or a particular environmental contamination event, cross-cutting positions and data systems that are shared across different public health areas are very difficult to maintain when funding is a series of three-year categorical grants. So, sustainable public health funding is a better use of federal funds as it enables the public health system to keep people with skills in communications, education policy, epidemiology, toxicology, laboratory. It allows us to keep those people on board, and that reduces investment in startup costs if we have to kind of re-engage every time we have a new subject. It also allows us to apply experience and consistency. Not only ongoing institutional projects, but allows us to bring that kind of experience immediately to bear when we have emerging threats and new challenges. So, sustainable funding is a much better investment for our tax dollars.

JOHNSON: 

Thank you. Dr. Lyon-Callo, we'll be watching what's next for public health in the great state of Michigan.

For more information about the Public Health Infrastructure Grant and to learn more about the work that's underway, you can visit the PHIG website. We have a link in the show notes.

That'll do it for today. We're back tomorrow morning with more ASTHO news and information. I'm Summer Johnson, you're listening to the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition. Have a great day.