Public Health departments are increasingly called upon to be innovative in quality service delivery under a dwindling resource climate as highlighted in several publications of the Institute of Medicine. Collaboration with other entities in the delivery of core public health services has emerged as a recurring theme. One model of this collaboration is an academic health department: a formal affiliation between a health professions school and a local health department. Initially targeted at workforce development, this model of collaboration has since yielded dividends in other core public health service areas including community assessment, program evaluation, community-based participatory research and data analysis.
The Duval County Health Department (DCHD), Florida, presents a unique community-centered model of the academic health department. Prominence in local informatics infrastructure capacity building and hosting a CDC-CSTE applied public health informatics fellowship (APHIF) in the Institute for Public Health Informatics and Research (IPHIR) in partnership with the Center for Health Equity Research, University of Florida & Shands medical center are direct dividends of this collaborative model.
Objective
Highlight one academic health department’s unique approach to optimizing collaborative opportunities for capacity development and document the implications for chronic disease surveillance and population health.