Data Hub 2023 Update

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We have reached an exciting moment with the NY School-Based Health Foundation's Data Hub in which for the first time we are poised to reap the value for which it was conceived and designed.

 

Successful growth of the Data Hub, made possible with DeCamp’s support, has given birth to this moment.  Over the last year, SBHC participation in the Data Hub has grown to 14 Sponsoring Organizations representing 50% of SBHC sites in New York State. As a result, the data is now robust enough to begin producing meaningful reporting on critical issues of SBHC performance and value for the SBHCs themselves, advocates, policy makers, and the health care and educational communities. 

 

Our goals for the coming year are ambitious:  (1) provide enhanced reporting and analytics,(2) add new data; (3) continue Data Hub growth, and (4) build sustainability, as follows:

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Reporting and Analytics: With the support of our current 2022-23 Decamp grant, for the first time we were able to stratify SBHC performance by geography (urban/rural) and size (small/medium/large), allowing us to meaningfully compare SBHC performance.  Additionally, by using diagnosis codes, we were able for the first time to provide basic analytics on behavioral health, chronic disease, and reproductive health—three of the most urgent issues facing New York’s school children.

 

Building on this cornerstone, in the coming year, our focus will be on the issue of disparities, stratifying for the first time by race/ethnicity and insurance type (as a proxy for economic status).   We will identify disease prevalence by diagnosis and assess disparities in the care received for these conditions by using a set of standard measures developed by state and national organizations.  As a result, we will be able to answer at the SBHC, regional and state levels such actionable questions as: 

What percentage of students with chronic diseases are seen by a provider at least twice per year (the minimum standard of care)?  
What percent of children are screened for depression, and of those showing signs and symptoms of depression, what percent are referred for treatment?  
 

New Data: Pending available resources, we intend to add dental data to the database, allowing us to assess disparities in children experiencing dental pain and dental caries, and receiving dental preventive care, such as dental sealants.

 

Continued Data Growth: We’re extraordinarily pleased at having reached the goal of 50% SBHC participation in the Data Hub.  We are striving for 60% in the coming year, on our way to the ultimate goal of 100%.  This task will become easier as SBHCs and the field see the value of the anaytics described above.

 

Research Partners:  We are working with a senior member of the research faculty at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health who has a long track record of research and publications on school-based health. He is impressed with the Data Hub and is suggesting that together we apply for a multi-year federal grant in school-based health evaluation. Such a grant will provide sustaining support to the Data Hub as well as attracting other academic partners interested in similar opportunities offered by the Data Hub. 

 

RHIO Partnerships: We have begun working with Healthix, the largest regional health exchange organization in the nation.  It includes 8,000 providers and 20 million patients in the New York City region.  If successful, the partnership holds two important potentials:  (1) wholesale recruitment of new SBHCs to the Data Hub, reducing the cost and time involved in our current one-on-one recruitment effort; and (2)  groundbreaking information on what services SBHC-enrolled children receive from other providers, such as hospitals, FQHCs, and community physicians.

 

Both partnerships are exciting and enormously advance the Data Hub potential for sustainability.

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About the Data Hub

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In the age of evidence-based medicine, New York’s school-based health centers (SBHCs) currently have no statewide data collection process, unlike every other health care sector. In 2019, with essential start-up funding provided by the New York Community Trust and the Ira W. DeCamp Foundation, the New York School-Based Health Foundation partnered with the New York School-Based Health Alliance (NYSBHA) to build a powerful tool for New York SBHCs: the New York SBHC Data Hub.

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Critical to SBHCs is the capacity to analyze, compare and improve individual SBHC performance and document the outcomes of SBHCs as is necessary for successful advocacy, managed care negotiations and transition to a value-based Medicaid reimbursement system.

 

This project builds on the results of a statewide assessment completed in August 2018 about implementation and data needs of SBHCs in New York State, funded by NYSBHA and conducted by Apex Evaluation. Generous continuation funding was provided by the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation in 2021 and renewed funding from the DeCamp Foundation in 2022 and 2023. Apex Evaluation, a small data firm with deep SBHC experience, has built and operates the Hub.

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We would like to thank our partners at APEX for putting together these slides for our Year 1 Data Hub pilot webinar in January 2021 and these slides for NYSBHA's conference in November of 2021.