Funded Program:
Environmental and Health Effect Tracking; Program Announcement #3074

Program Description:
The Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH), in partnership with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), will develop the Oklahoma Public Health Environmental Tracking System (OK-PHETS) using health effects data from the Oklahoma Central Cancer Registry (OCCR), the Oklahoma Birth Defects Registry (OBDR), the Oklahoma Asthma Surveillance System (OASS), and the Oklahoma Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (OLPPP). The DEQ currently collects data regarding public water supplies, air quality, landfills, chemical use by facilities across the state, total air emissions, lead-based paint abated structures, and hazardous waste generators. The DEQ collects information about 14 Superfund sites and 117 voluntary cleanup and Brownfield sites. These hazards data will be used for this linkage project. The Oklahoma tracking project will be coordinated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to ensure compatibility with the developing National Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Network.

The overall goal of this project is to bridge the gap between health problems and environmental hazards by linking health data and exposure data with environmental hazard data. Methods, tools, and best practices developed through the Oklahoma project will be used to advance the development of an environmental public health tracking network at the state, local, and national level.

The specific goals of this project are to:

• Link data on childhood lead poisoning, asthma, birth defects, and cancer with environmental hazard data from the DEQ
• Standardize the surveillance systems within the OSDH and DEQ to allow for ongoing surveillance, linking of data, assessment of health problems, development of public health interventions, assessment of intervention effectiveness, and dissemination of findings about priority health exposures and health effects.

OK-PHETS will be implemented in stages. In the first year, OLPPP surveillance systems and the OBDR data will be linked with DEQ environmental hazards data. The OASS and OCCR data will be added during the second year. The third year will consist of implementing and evaluating the data dissemination and communication plan, improving data sharing and evaluation processes, and finalizing documentation.