The Missouri Center for Public Health Excellence has helped the Jefferson County Health Department to evaluate how its mobile clinics can best address health disparities and reach vulnerable populations within the program’s service area. The project was conducted as part of the Local Public Health Disparities Initiative from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services and supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Allie Bodin, MPH, CPH, health data analytics and informatics manager at MOCPHE, worked with JCHD to design an operations-based decision tree that helps JCHD staffers decide which clinics to pursue and what services to provide in line with their mission.

By asking a series of questions ordered by priority, JCHD now systematizes the processes by which the program decides which clinics to offer, allowing for monitoring and evaluation of clinic success. To guide JCHD’s decision-making, Allie developed an intake questionnaire collecting demographic, social determinants of health, health behavior, and health outcome data from patients to better understand the populations JCHD services reach. Allie also created two questionnaires for potential partners: the first questionnaire screens whether partners are ready to host a clinic in terms of logistics, and the second questionnaire acquires information to help JCHD decide whether a proposed clinic aligns with JCHD priorities. These questionnaires were designed to be tailored to collect different data indicators over time depending upon the needs of the department for directing practice. Allie’s work sparked so much interest from mobile healthcare leaders within healthcare and public health in recent months that she has been able to share details with more than 275 mobile health service providers and public health professionals in Missouri as well as across the United States and Canada. She presented at the Mobile Healthcare Association’s Missouri Regional Coalition meeting in April on “Data-Driven Decision-Making to Advance Health Equity,” educating providers on how to acquire and use data to direct operations.

At the Mobile Healthcare Association’s 19th Annual Mobile Health Clinics Conference in September, Allie hosted a session entitled, “Designing Operations Decision Support to Establish Partnerships that Advance Health Equity,” which focused on translation of the decision-tree from a conceptual to practical tool for use in day-to-day operations and evaluation. Allie also presented at the Joint Missouri Public Health Conference in September, speaking about the project as a health equity initiative within the context of data modernization and security in Missouri. Allie also co-authored a chapter in the 2nd edition of the Mobile Healthcare Association’s Mobile Healthcare Program Start-Up Guide. That chapter, called “Monitoring and Evaluations: A Guide to Ongoing Program Improvement,” was written with Meghan Guptill, MPH; Kristin Mikolowsky, MSc; and Heather Nelson, PhD, MPH. It includes appendices containing the tools Allie developed: the “Operations-Based Decision Tree,” “Intake Questionnaire for Mobile Health Services,” “1st Questionnaire for Potential Partners: Logistics of Mobile Health Services,” and “2nd Questionnaire for Potential Partners: Mobile Health Service Priorities.” Interested in this project? Contact us for more information at abodin@mocphe.org.