Using Data to Apply Management Strategies in Public Health Collaboratives

A major challenge facing state and local public health agencies is how to effectively partner with other organizations, agencies, and groups to leverage limited resources to fulfill their missions. As an important complement to measuring more traditional public health program inputs and outputs, public health personnel need to understand how to quantify and analyze the collaborations they are involved in - for example, what kinds of interactions they have and how often they connect—as well as where the gaps are. These types of data provide a resource for public health managers to engage in collaborative governance, particularly strategic network management, of their community collaboratives. This presentation demonstrates how public health managers use data to practice strategic network management and collaborative governance to improve connectivity in public health collaboratives.

Three PHCs were asked to participate in a project of data collection and evaluation. Each included 30+ partnering organizations. Social Network Analysis (SNA), a methodology which helps to explain how actors connect to one another, thus elucidating the structural makeup of collaborative relationships, was used to analyze collaborative tendencies of community partnerships. The data was collected using PARTNER (Program Program to Analyze, Record, and Track Networks to Enhance Relationships), a social network analysis program specifically designed to gather relational data within public health collaboratives (PHCs).

All three PHCs demonstrate tendencies of shared resources contribution, high levels of trust, a high level of interest in seeing the good realized, and ability for those involved to demonstrate connectivity in such a way that taps into the cliques that exist among a network of stakeholders. Factors such as the maturity of the collaborative and the extent of resource contribution and levels of trust were found to be telling in terms of how they are organized and implemented.