In June 2024, National Coordinating Center for TECPHI (NCC) staff members participated in a Digital Storytelling workshop. This workshop was offered to staff at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), the parent organization of the Alaska Native EpiCenter and the NCC, as part of a partnership between ANTHC and Creative Narrations.

Participants in this workshop honed their skills in telling personal health stories via video. Hearing directly from individuals, hearing their voices, their values, their perspective of relevant health problems and their solutions can help us better understand fighting chronic disease within the world of Tribal communities.

Stories serve an important role in NCC national evaluation: to highlight program success, emphasize indigenous core values and knowledge, show the reach and impact of the NCC and TECPHI, and to connect grantees who are working on the various public health strategies across Tribal health organizations.

View Mishelle’s digital story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUBabuDQ2MU

---

The Northwest Tribal Epidemiology Center (NWTEC), housed within the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board (NPAIHB), is preparing to launch Beta testing of the Northwest Tribal Data Hub application (Data Hub) to an initial cohort of Northwest Tribes during the summer of 2024. This milestone will signify the culmination of three and a half years of planning, learning, and developing the foundational infrastructure of the Data Hub. As we near this milestone, NWTEC’s Data Hub team reflects on the successes and lessons learned from this developmental phase of the platform.

What is the Northwest Tribal Data Hub?

At its core, the Northwest Tribal Data Hub seeks to connect Northwest Tribal Nations with their data. When fully developed, the Data Hub will provide Tribes in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington with secure, direct, and easy access to public health data on topics such as demographics, cancer, substance use and overdose, leading causes of death, and other public health issues within their Tribal areas. The Data Hub utilizes data obtained from state and federal agencies, including vital records, disease registries, and health surveys. When possible, the data have been improved for Tribal communities by correcting the misclassification of AI/AN people. Tribes will access the Data Hub through a secure login and can view, interact with, and download data through visual and interactive dashboards. Each Tribe will be able to view key public health indicators for their Tribal service area, state, and the Northwest region.

Building NWTEC’s Data and Tribal Engagement Infrastructure

The Data Hub represents a significant investment in modernizing NWTEC’s data and information technology infrastructure. The initial planning phase included defining our goals and outcomes for the Data Hub, assessing the feasibility of its development, and engaging four Tribes in a proof of concept to test the underlying technology and gauge interest in further development. As part of that planning phase, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment emerged as the best platform to host the Data Hub. The first, foundational step of the development phase was to design, build, and test the Data Hub’s security to ensure confidential data are protected and accessible through the data pipeline. With platform’s security developed and tested, NWTEC’s data assets were migrated to a database and formatted to support the analysis and visualization of public health indicators. The data visualization tool, QuickSight, is used to develop interactive dashboards that report key indicators on Northwest Tribes’ priority health issues. The first dashboard to be launched addresses one of the Northwest Tribes’ highest priority issues – drug overdoses.

 

---

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored many strengths of the Alaska Tribal Health System (ATHS) and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), however it also brought to light opportunities for improvement in Tribal public health infrastructure throughout the state and emphasized the need for ANTHC and the ATHS to be better prepared for future public health emergencies.

Supported by TECPHI funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Alaska Native Epidemiology Center (ANEC) contributed to ANTHC’s efforts to invest purposefully in infrastructure to improve public health and strengthen its capacity. Using Tribal public health assessments, ANEC staff worked throughout FY23 and FY24 to evaluate the ATHS’s capacity to deliver the essential public health services and inform ANTHC’s efforts to align its public health initiatives with its strategic direction.

As a result of the information gained in these assessments, ANTHC identified areas for which an immediate was response was possible including funding additional positions in Emergency Preparedness, establishing Tribal public health infrastructure sub-award funding opportunities, creating a Research Advisory Network, and strengthening partnerships and networking relationships with partners such as the State of Alaska. Additional work continues on these assessments, and the results continue to provide valuable insights for the Alaska Native EpiCenter, the ANTHC Division of Community Health Services, and the organization as a whole.

Maria Caruso presents on Tribal Public Health Assessment processes and results and the 2023 EpiCenter Scientific Advisory Council.

---