Policy surveillance and the many ways it can be used to expand the capacity of the public health community

Law is an important and powerful element of public health practice, and policy surveillance, the systematic collection and analysis of laws and policies, has emerged as the most efficient and cost effective means of creating scientific legal data for evaluation, enabling practitioners to track laws across jurisdictions and over time. In order to facilitate policy surveillance Public Health Law Research has created an innovative tool that makes policy surveillance easier and more efficient, thereby enhancing the policy capacity in the public health workforce.

The strength of this innovative, web-based tool is its flexibility and three projects completed using it illustrate the ways this technology can be used to increase the legal capacity of the public health community. The first, a collaboration between Public Health Law Research and Nebraska Department of Health, illustrates how this tool can be used to collect and display laws and regulations related to one institutions core mission at the state, county and city level, and make that information available to the public health workforce. The second, the creation of a Prescription Drug Abuse Policy System for the National Institution of Drug Abuse illustrates the way data can displayed using an application program interface to create policy surveillance systems related to a specific topic, keeping stakeholders, researchers and policymakers informed about the state of the law. Finally, a series of datasets regarding civil commitment will be discussed to show how this technology can be used to comprehensively cover a topic across jurisdictions.