Tools to assist in the development of sharing agreements across public health jurisdictions

The Center for Sharing Public Health Services is a national resource on cross-jurisdictional sharing (CJS) in public health. CJS occurs when public jurisdictions share services and capacities in order to build economies of scale that allow more effective and efficient operations. The Center builds evidence and produces and disseminates tools, methods and models to assist public health agencies and policymakers as they consider and adopt CJS approaches. As a result of this work, which included support to 16 demonstration sites in 14 states, the Center has developed a knowledge repository and produced several tools to assist health departments in the planning and implementation of cross jurisdictional sharing (CJS) agreements. The main product is a roadmap to the development of cross jurisdictional sharing agreements, which describes three phases in the CJS process: explore (conceptual feasibility), prepare and plan (operational feasibility), and implement and improve. Tools have been developed to assist interested jurisdictions in moving along the recommended roadmap. Some of the tools that will be presented are an assessment of shared services, a tool to measure inter-organizational trust, and a model to determine the apportionment of the cost of shared services.