Establishing Standards and Common Criteria for Local Policy Databases for Healthy Communities

Through its Cooperative Agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Network of Public Health Institutes engaged a partnership of public health institutes led by Illinois Public Health Institute to conduct a scan of the local policy database environment across the United States.  NNPHI and CDC's Division of Community Health sought to understand the landscape of local policy databases supporting healthy communities initiatives and potential options for the future.  The project partners conducted key informant interviews with subject matter experts as well as online assessments of potential database users and existing database stewards.  This effort confirmed a lack of any comprehensive national-level database containing local policies supporting healthy communities and proposed conditions under which such a system might be created. Existing local policy databases differed in focus, structure, detail, accessibility and comprehensiveness because of the siloed nature of project funding, absence of any central coordination, and lack of standards.  No single database addressed all topics related to healthy communities initiatives, and not all public policy areas for healthy communities were addressed in existing databases.  Most policy databases did not reflect the increasing interest in quantitative analysis and policy impact, nor the increasing emphasis on public health systems and social determinants of health. Recommendations include creating a forum and process for establishing standards and common criteria for policy databases, and leveraging desirable features of existing databases and tools. While existing databases might be leveraged for future replication, current interests of practitioners and researchers may require the creation of new models.  A framework for evaluating these options is proposed.