Montana and Wyoming tribes now have a new tool for collecting, tracking and analyzing health information.
In mid-August the Rocky Mountain Tribal Epidemiology Center, part of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, brought in a trainer from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to teach tribal health officials how to use software to track population health data.
The tribes can develop their own surveys and analyze the data collected by them, said Jordan Vandjelovic, an RMTEC epidemiologist who helped bring in the CDC official.
Members from Montana’s Blackfeet, Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Fort Belknap reservations and Wyoming’s Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes attended the five-day training. They learned how to use a free program called Epi Info 7, billed as an easy-to-use system of creating and analyzing data.
Pharah Morgan, RMTEC epidemiologist, said it’s the same free training and program the CDC provides to foreign countries in need of public health assistance and described it as “the standard for health authorities.”
While the CDC didn’t respond to an interview request for this story, its website says it has a wide range of uses, including outbreak investigations, developing disease surveillance systems, analysis and reporting of larger data groups and educating the public and officials on epidemiology and public health.
“It provides for easy data entry form and database construction, a customized data entry experience, and data analyses with epidemiologic statistics, maps, and graphs for public health professionals who may lack an information technology background,” according to the CDC’s website.
Vandejlovic said he envisions tribes tracking diseases and other health issues. For example, they might use it to develop a quick survey on seat belt use, import it to a mobile device and then send a representative out with the survey to determine seat belt usage in a particular area.
Or, he said, they might use it to gather information on the availability of healthy meals in a specific area and cross that with the prevalence of chronic disease there.
In the fall of 2015 Vandjelovic was working on a needs assessment for an injury prevention grant and, through that research, learned that tribal communities didn’t have much in the way of health data management.
Soon after, Morgan was working on a tribal behavioral health survey and what their needs were, and she saw the same trend: “It was not knowing how to use the data, how to analyze it,” she said.
A supervisor recommended the CDC program. She reached out, eventually getting approval for the August educational session.
The training, held at Rocky Mountain College, focused on everything from getting the program set up on a computer to mapping, entering data and creating surveys.
The use of such technology is minimal within many tribal offices in the region, Vandjelovic said, so the training also covered the basics of the technology’s use and installation.
Morgan said that the training helps to fulfill one of the RMTEC’s and tribal leaders council’s goals of helping to expand and improve development of public health services, systems and epidemiological data.”This is the first time our organization has done something for the tribes in this capacity,” she said. “They can understand their data a lot faster now.”
