States usually tackle an issue like infant mortality by designing programs to encourage top-down behavioral change by mothers who are deemed to be at-risk.
Ohio is taking a different approach, without preconditioned assumptions, which combines comprehensive cross-agency data sharing and collaboration with intelligent analytics to uncover finely targeted pathways to better birth and infant mortality outcomes.
Led by the Ohio Department of Health and Department of Administrative Services, the State is analyzing information from a vast array of over 200 datasets, including, for the first time ever, 31 datasets from across Ohio’s State agencies, as well as countless other public, federal and third-party sources. The State is attacking this unprecedented dataset in an innovative and collaborative fashion using fast-moving, cross-disciplinary teams, incorporating Human-Centered Service Design into the process and guided by appropriate ethical oversight and governance.
The end goals: to identify underlying and common drivers, to enable targeted, preventive interventions, and to drive effective programmatic action. With these data-driven insights, the State is focused on behavior change that will positively impact the quality and consistency of service delivery by the agencies and medical and service providers around the State, improving outcomes among Ohio families who may be at risk of losing their child.
Ohio is working with Accenture to unify and analyze the data, verging beyond traditional academic research. These data include information related to the health of Ohio’s infants and mothers—such as vital statistics, Child Fatality Review, claims history, as well as data pertaining to the Social Determinants of Health such as education, neighborhood and environment, transportation, and economic stability, as well as behavioral health and State benefits information. Combining these data with medical factors and demographic and census data, the team continued to answer three historically difficult questions:
- Which mothers and infants are most at risk of infant death?
- Which mothers and infants are most likely to benefit and participate in interventions?
- Which interventions and programs yield the best return on investment in the form of saved infant lives?