Dr. Bob Rauner testified before the Nebraska Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee this fall on LR433, an interim study introduced by State Senator Jen Day (District 49) to examine the availability and access to data regarding maternal health and infant health care in Nebraska. Dr. Rauner is president of Partnership for a Healthy Lincoln.
Incomplete, missing or delayed data is one of our biggest challenges to improving the health of Nebraskans. Data challenges usually come in three main buckets:
- No trend over time. Simply showing that numbers are up or down 10% vs. last year is not adequate. We need at least five years of trend in reports.
- No comparisons. We need to know how we’re doing compared to other states as well as different regions or groups within the state. Examples include comparisons between regions, race/ethnicity or payer status.
- Data is old. Nobody runs a successful business or program with data that is two or three years old. We should have data through 2023 for most health data in Nebraska by now, and ideally, we would find ways to get quarterly data.
The new Nebraska Vital Statistics Birth Dashboard is a good step in the right direction as it fixes some of our data gaps around trends and timeliness. Some of the needed comparisons have been added such as race and ethnicity, but payer status and further breakdowns are needed for project evaluation. The next step is refining the dashboard to better serve ongoing efforts to improve maternal child health at the local level.
Develop public-private partnerships to share data
This isn’t just about health, it’s also about money. Nebraska spends more than $193 million annually on Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) admissions. The NICU costs are just the tip of the iceberg—those kids continue to rack up health care costs for months or years, have increased need for early intervention services and add to special education costs for Nebraska’s K-12 schools. If we want to reduce these costs, we need a successful effort to reduce infant morbidity, and timely health data will be essential to a successful effort. The best solution is to develop public-private partnerships with data sharing and analysis between the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services (NDHHS), local health departments, universities and community health organizations as is done in other states and has been done in Nebraska in the past. Needed data is submitted from hospitals to NDHHS within five business days (Vital Statistics Statutes 71-604); Nebraska statutes discuss the possibility of sharing this data with researchers.
We should establish a clear process to do this, similar to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which would enable better collaboration between all of us working to improve the health of Nebraska’s pregnant women and children. The CDC has an approval process to do this. My organization has been approved by the CDC to work with Nebraska data for the past three years and we have an existing data use agreement with the CDC. That’s the data source we use for the visuals live on the Partnership for a Healthy Nebraska website.
What other states are doing
In New Jersey, the Central Jersey Family Health Consortium has monthly access to state data for their region displayed in an interactive dashboard (scroll down), likely a core reason New Jersey is now the #3 state for lowest U.S. infant mortality rate. And the state of Kansas produces county-level data for non-profit organizations that work on community projects, like the Kansas Breastfeeding Coalition. These examples of public-private collaboration is what we should work toward in Nebraska.
Learn more about why access to data is key: LB75 will yield data to help reduce health crises during childbirth
