Clinicians, providers, and researchers realize that the health of individuals and communities is impacted by the social, cultural, economic, and physical environment in which they live, work, and play. It is difficult to address these multiple determinants of health effectively because the delivery of services is split among the medical, public health, social, and community service sectors.
A partnership led by the IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health established the Collaborative Research Center at Indiana University. Other partners include The Polis Center, Eskenazi Hospital, Regenstrief Institute, and the Marion County Public Health Department. Funded through a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) grant, the Center’s goal is to study how to improve population and clinical health with integrated services and advanced analytics.
The Collaborative Research Center is studying how to improve population and clinical health outcomes with integrated services and advanced analytics, mixing complementary social, behavioral, and medical services by multiple providers. The research study has three aims: determine the impact of integrated service delivery on health outcomes in a safety-net population; determine the impact of community, population and public health advanced analytics in identifying and linking patients to needed integrated services; and identify the benefits and challenges of public health participation in case conferences.
Polis provides expertise on social, cultural, economic, and environmental data for predictive modeling of community health risk.
The Center’s work builds upon the spatial information infrastructure that Polis developed as part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-funded Indiana Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics. The developed infrastructure permits Center researchers to geographically link clinical data in the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) with data about the social determinants of health.
For more information, contact Karen Comer.
