962: Data Modernization + PHIG

SUMMER JOHNSON: 

This is the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition for Tuesday, August 5, 2025. I'm Summer Johnson. Now, today's news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

This morning, we begin with another installment of the PHIG Impact Report, a segment that showcases the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, otherwise known as PHIG, and how your colleagues across the nation are using it. And today, we're talking about the vital role of PHIG funding with Dr. Brooke Cunningham, an ASTHO member and the commissioner of health for the Minnesota Department of Health.

Dr. Cunningham, what are some of the ways public health departments can utilize PHIG funding?

BROOKE CUNNINGHAM: 

PHIG has been such an important investment in public health for our country. Clearly coming out of COVID, what we all realized was we were caught a little bit flat-footed in terms of, particularly, in terms of data infrastructure, in terms of our ability to mount a timely public health response that met the demands of the pandemic. Certainly, the pandemic was unprecedented, but we know that public health has been under-invested in for years, and so, the PHIG infrastructure funds allow us to really implement the lessons of the pandemic, and many of those are both in the in those two categories, as you mentioned, the lessons for data modernization and data infrastructure. We've been- many public health departments, even a nationally-renowned department such as the Minnesota Department of Health, struggle with old, outdated legacy systems, which are functional, but in some ways barely functional, right? And we really want to modernize, move it to the 21st Century in terms of tools and technologies, certainly, with data modernization funds, we've been able to invest in new infrastructure and- and new systems, and really we continue to try to identify and create efficiencies in those systems and support interoperability.

JOHNSON: 

Through all the work your department was able to do, were there any good lessons learned about how to best implement the funding?

CUNNINGHAM: 

One of the wonderful benefits of the PHIG funding has been its flexibilities, right? It's not a line item, it's not categorical spending. It allows you to meet the needs of the agency as as you see them. And so, the funding not being prescriptive, has been incredibly important. The other thing that I think that my colleagues across the country would recognize is the importance of addressing the morale of our public health professionals. We want people to stay in public health. People come into public health because they're mission-driven. And governmental public health is, is, is a tough gig, and- and many days it feels extremely hard. And so, the PHIG grant funding to really focus on workforce and workforce development, but also workforce well-being has been really important. I would say that we talk a lot, particularly coming out of the pandemic, about trauma-informed workplaces, and we have some notion of, you know, what that means, most of us, it's a little- still a little foggy, because most of us actually don't yet work in that trauma-informed workplace. And so, what we've been able to do with PHIG is to really hire a workplace culture director and a director of organizational wellness and employee experience, and so that- that person is helping us think about what we need to do to make our department a trauma-informed workplace. Really focus on the well-being of our employees.

JOHNSON: 

You talked a little bit about the data infrastructure improvements your department made. Can you walk us through those?

CUNNINGHAM: 

We have new data teams that are really maintained through the PHIG funding. They work on a myriad of different projects to make our data more accessible, more timely, and so, that is that is really important. Other things that I would just list out for you are, we have, for example, a new laboratory information system, and so, that allows us to streamline our workflows for ordering, testing, and reporting lab results. We decrease the amount of database management done by our staff, and it increases the visibility of our laboratory data to the communities that we serve. Another development in the data spaces, we hired a chief data and analytics officer. Certainly, data modernization needs a lead. But as- as we know, as we talked about, the way that money's come into an agency, they come in in these sort of line item buckets that can contribute to silos within an agency, and so to have somebody in a position to really create alignment to work across the division, so that we have a cohesive data modernization plan for everybody, that everybody can see themselves in, but where people have shared ownership, where there's- where there's trust, not only internally, but we build trust with external partners. The monies have allowed us, when I talk about external partners, to think about how we show up for local public health. There's now a new role that is sort of a local public health data liaison role through these monies to make sure we are hearing what the data needs are from our local public health partners, but also to make it easy for people from the outside to navigating getting access to MDHS data.

JOHNSON: 

Finally, why is it essential to fund public health continuously, not just in an emergency?

CUNNINGHAM: 

Sustainable public health funding is incredibly important. We have talked about the cycle of panic and neglect that public health enters. We have a pandemic, and we're- we're throwing a lot of money at it because we've under-resourced public health for decades before that happens. And so, certainly, we don't want to be in this cycle of panic and neglect the cycle of reactivity. We want to be much more proactive. The great thing as we talk about thinking about who's most affected by health inequities, public health's role is to really think about what those interventions are that are community-driven and community-responsive and culturally appropriate, so everybody can achieve their optimal health. And so we need to have that funding so that not only we can maintain the data systems that we've talked about, but when we talk about community, we also need to maintain the relationships right. We built a whole bunch of new relationships and deepened those relationships in the pandemic, and we have to maintain those relationships. We can't let them go stale. It's so important for public health practice for us to do that and to work with communities to really identify, particularly when there are fewer resources, where to focus.

JOHNSON: 

Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us. Dr Cunningham.

You can learn more about the Public Health Infrastructure Grant and the work that it supports by visiting 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.