Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System is one of Maine’s standard health behavior surveillance systems, data from which informs policy development, program planning, and other public health interventions for chronic disease prevention. This project will assist the Maine BRFSS coordinator and the Maine CDC to achieve BRFSS objectives. Muskie School staff will update the BRFSS interactive web query as well as maintain multiple-year standardized datasets, add the most recent year of data, and update documentation. Muskie staff will also perform other analyses as necessary, including multivariate and trend analyses to help the Maine CDC better understand prevalence, risk factors and disease management for health behaviors and conditions (such as diabetes, asthma, and cardiovascular disease) that impose a heavy burden on the residents of Maine and its health care system.
This project will consist of the evaluation and data analysis activities of the Oxford Hills Health Moms project, an obesity prevention intervention of the Maine Physical Activity and Nutrition Program for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2005, the Department of Health and Human Services, (DHHS) and Muskie School jointly developed a proposal for the DHHS to enter into a five-year agreement wit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The purpose of the grant is to develop a coordinated, strategic approach to reduce the incidence, and morbidity of injury through surveillance and prevention efforts. More specifically, this agreement will enable the Maine Injury Prevention Program (MIPP) to: Build a solid infrastructure for injury prevention; collect and analyze injury data; design, implement, and evaluate interventions through collaboration with partners; provide technical support and training; and reduce the burden of injury in Maine through public policy. The purpose of the one-year agreement is to fund program management to carry out the following activities: strategic, data-driven program planning and development, facilitated stakeholder involvement, technical report development using new surveillance data, grants management, technical assistance to organizations implementing injury prevention and control programs, stakeholders and staff on conducting evaluation; selecting best-practice interventions, program development (using logic models), using new injury surveillance data, reviewing progress towards project goals and objectives, and preparing and submitting reports to CDC.
complete an organizational assessment, including assessment of existing evaluation efforts in nine public health program areas. Project staff will use the assessment data to The Association of Public Health Laboratories will contract with Muskie School to design an organizational quality improvement plan and approach. Results and recommendation will be used by APHL to launch a more systemic quality improvement plan.
Strategic Prevention Framework, State Incentive Grant
Abstract:
Muskie/IPSI will partner with Maine DHHS Office of Substance Abuse to provide epidemiological services for Maine?s Strategic Prevention Framework State Incentive Grant. Activities include providing staff support to a statewide epidemiological workgroup, conducting a state-level needs and resources assessment, and initiating GIS (Geographical Information System) mapping to identify existing data sources and their appropriate use. This will bring systematic, analytical thinking to the causes and consequences of substance abuse in order to effectively and efficiently utilize substance abuse prevention resources
The Maine Center for Public Health is performing program evaluation for Healthy Maine Partnerships, and will continue to partner with the MSPS to provide specific deliverables for various program components of the HMP initiative. MSPS will identify/develop additional performance indicators, update data, and perform quantitative data analyses. Results will be incorporated into the overall HMP Evaluation reports and products.
This Cooperative Agreement supports implementation of the Maine Crime Victimization Survey with 800 Maine residents and enables the Muskie School, USM to accomplish the following activities between November and December, 2006. Interviewing survey participants; preparing surveys for analysis by cleaning, coding, entering all data in Excel files.
MSAD 55 (Cornish, Hiram area) has recently received a large federal grant to implement serveral new programs. As part of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students initiative, they will develop mental health and substance abuse programs among others. If selected, the Muskie School will provide a mandated evaluation of their new programs. This evaluation willl include both process and outcomes components, as well as a contextual evaluation, to help measure the extend to which the District has met their goals. It will involve several surveys and analysis of secondary data sources to provide those measures. This project presents an opportunity for the Muskie School to continue strengthening our experience and expertise in the area of program evaluation. It will also allow futrther cross-unit collaboration between IHP, the Survey Research Center, and IPSI.
The overall objective of this project is to measure the degree to which fear of medical malpractice litigation motivates physicians to practice positive defensive medicine, which includes ordering tests, procedures, and/or medications that offer little or no clinical benefit to patients. Using medical and pharmaceutical claims data from a large national heath insurance company, we will use regression analyses to relate physicians' malpractice premiums and county-level medical malpractice filing rates to the costs of diagnosing and treating a wide range of clinical conditions. Our analyses will allow us to: (a) identify diagnoses/conditions in which defensive medicine occurs, (b) measure dollar costs associated with defensive medicine in each of these conditions, and (c) identify specific health care resources (types of tests, procedures, and medications) being used defensively in each of these conditions. In addition to two types of malpractice tort signals -- medical malpractice premium data obtained from state insurance departments and commercial services that offer these data, and county-level malpractice suit filing rates obtained from state court administrative agencies --the project data base will include claims from a commercial population of 10.5 million people residing in 48 states that have been grouped into episodes of care using Symmetry Health Data System's Episode Treatment Group methodology.
Licensing functions within the department have historically been administered in separate units focused on distinct programs or populations. Although some degree of separation is justified and in fact needed due to the specialized nature of the services and programs, there are also significant areas of commonality. The trend nationally, as supported by the National Association of Regulatory Administration (NARA), is to define the common function areas within regulatory administration and provide training that address these commonalities and crosses program boundaries. The Licensing Training Committee is a task force of professionals representing each area of human care licensing. This group collaboratively identifies training needs, then plans and coordinates training opportunities for all human care licensing staff. The objectives of these trainings are to improve skills and competencies in order to develop and maintain consistent interpretation and enforcement of licensing standards, and to promote career development and enhance job satisfaction.
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