Using Epidemiological Data to Enhance Substance Abuse Prevention Among States, Tribes, and Jurisdictions

How can we build functional data-driven decision making systems using epidemiological data that optimize features of science and systems?  Since 2004, 65 States, Tribes, and Jurisdictions (STJs) have received federal funding from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) to establish epidemiological workgroups, a network of people/ organizations that bring analytical and other data expertise to strengthen outcome-based thinking for substance abuse prevention.  Epidemiological Workgroups assist STJ prevention systems with outcome-based thinking, a process that begins by assessing population-based, real-time problems using substance-related consequence and consumption data.  Upon identifying data constructs, indicators, and sources of substance use and related consequences, epidemiological workgroups are involved in describing and drawing inferences from the data.  This information provides a basis for data to inform STJs’ setting health priorities, allocating resources, planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating prevention efforts, and formulating prevention policies. Taken together, this combination of data infrastructure, analytic capacities, and data use across STJ organizations has created the strong foundation for data monitoring, reflection, and adjustments to enhance prevention investments and practice over time.

Nationally, training and technical assistance supports guided this work. From that perspective, this paper describes cross-cutting features of epidemiological workgroups and their data-guided approach to inform, enhance, and focus STJ substance abuse prevention systems.  The paper will (a) describe the epidemiological workgroup infrastructure and sentinel data for assessment, (b) outline a process and set of epidemiological and other empirical parameters for using data to determine substance abuse prevention priorities, and (c) examine data-guided resource allocation processes. The session will also (d) explore the realities and challenges of STJ substance abuse prevention systems’ using epidemiological data to identify prevention priorities and define data-guided approaches for allocating resources.