State Tobacco Activities Tracking and Evaluation (STATE) System: Connecting Stakeholders to Disparate Data for Evaluation and Program Improvement

Introduction: Tobacco remains the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, and a source of substantial excess medical expenditure. As part of its mission to reduce the incidence of tobacco related disease and preventable death, CDC's Office on Smoking created the National Tobacco Control Program (NTCP). The NTCP funds tobacco control activities in all 50 states, 7 territories and the District of Columbia.

The data necessary to evaluate state tobacco control programs, such as tobacco use prevalence, tobacco-related legislation, and policies are available from many sources. It is, however, often difficult to obtain and compare these data. To disseminate state level data, OSH created the STATE System. The STATE System presents over 330 state-level data measures.

Key Points: STATE System is an electronic data warehouse containing up-to-date and historical state-level data on tobacco use prevention and control. This interactive, web-based data resource integrates tobacco control data from multiple, disparate sources into comprehensive summary reports to facilitate evaluation and policy support and to aid in consistent data interpretation across states. Benefits: The System collects multiple types of data from multiple disparate sources, many of which are not readily available elsewhere, and presents them in a unified space, ideal for evaluations.

Conclusions: Public health professionals can use the System's broad range of data and advanced reporting features to report on detailed single state data, trends over time, compare data for multiple states, export data to a spreadsheet for further analysis, and produce attractive graphs to export for use in presentations.