982: Collated Public Health Data; Succession Planning

SUMMER JOHNSON: 

This is the award-winning Public Health Review Morning Edition for Wednesday, September 3, 2025. I'm Summer Johnson. Now, today's news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

ANNE ZINK: 

Communities, local health officials, public health officials will have a much better sense of how this information is relevant to their community than any nationalized system, any university, any other place.

JOHNSON: 

That's former ASTHO president Dr. Anne Zink, who's currently a senior clinical fellow at Yale University. When she served as Alaska's chief medical officer, Zink noticed it was often a challenge to find the data that her agency needed to make critical decisions. Now, through her work with Yale, Zink is on the team that has developed PopHIVE, an interactive database of de-identified population-level health data. Zink and her team hope it helps public health officials navigate local health trends.

ZINK: 

What we do is we pull in data sources that many states already have access to, like CDC data, other publicly available data sets, try to make it easy, clean, interactive, so that you don't have to go to all- you don't have to go to a wastewater site and then syndromic surveillance site and then a testing site to try to understand the data.

JOHNSON: 

PopHIVE's goal is to put all the data together so that everyone can play a role in understanding what their community may need.

ZINK: 

I really think public health is the health of the people we serve, and that isn't that responsibility cannot be solely held by governmental public health and by democratizing it. We all hold the data information, and honestly [the] responsibility, to improve population health as a whole.

JOHNSON: 

Zink says creating the database has been a highly collaborative process, and hopes her public health colleagues will provide feedback.

ZINK: 

Take a look, play with it, know that it's not static. We have a bunch more data coming in very, very soon, and we want to co-create it with you all. So, just send us an email and let us know what it looks like.

JOHNSON: 

You can check out the resource and help Zink's team with needed feedback by heading to PopHIVE.org. That's P-O-P-H-I-V-E.org, or save time by heading to the show notes. We have a link right to it.

On deck this week, tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, August 4, ASTHO is holding its first session in a series of succession planning workshops. Joy Ermie, health commissioner of Henry County Health Department, will lead ASTHO's upcoming succession planning webinar series. Ermie gives us a preview on the webinar series and the topics it will cover, such as preventing public health staff from burnout.

JOY ERMIE: 

Succession planning can help with that feeling by demonstrating to staff that there's a plan for them, and it shows that they're worth the investment, and we can combat turnover in that way.

JOHNSON: 

Ermie says the first step to getting started is to have the right team in place.

ERMIE: 

Succession planning is going to take time, resources, a lot of patience, and effort from various people. So, with that agency head on-board, the succession planning subject matter expert has a partner in garnering the support that's needed.

JOHNSON: 

To public health officials who are unsure about succession planning, Ermie says you can start now.

ERMIE: 

Staff are going to turn over. People are going to take new positions, and we do not want to put that burden of all that extra work on our existing staff. We need to plan. We're great at planning in public health, and you definitely have enough time and resources to do this.

JOHNSON: 

Again, that first session of the succession planning webinar series will happen tomorrow, Thursday, September 4, at 2 p.m. Eastern. You can still register for that event now using the link in the show notes.

Next up in ASTHO member news, Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, gave the closing keynote at last week's National Conference on Tobacco or Health. Vohra shared his agency's work in tobacco prevention and discussed what public health can do to further reduce tobacco use and close disparities in different communities. You can use the link in the show notes to read more about that conference.

Now, finally, this morning, if your agency is looking to bring its administrative and organizational capacities up to date, be sure to check out ASTHO's State and Territorial Administrative Readiness Center, also known as the STAR Center. It offers resources, tools, and best practices to build infrastructure and address critical population health needs. There's a link to the resource 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.