Behavioral health problems, especially those related to substance abuse and mental health, are a growing problem in Burlington, as they are nationwide.

With a grant from Michigan State University’s CAPE (Community Assessment and Education to Promote Behavioral Health Planning and Evaluation) project, the University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies will develop a first-of-its-kind online community health and public safety “dashboard” of timely data that will allow local officials in Burlington to respond more effectively to the shifting mix of behavioral health issues that emerge in its neighborhoods.

The work will be done in conjunction with the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission, the Burlington Police Department, the University of Vermont Medical Center, the Howard Center, and a number of other local and regional service agencies.

The dashboard will function as a trend-spotting early warning system, aggregating existing but now hard-to-access community-level data across more than 150 data points, gathered on a timely basis.

Examples of data points the dashboard will display include arrests for behavioral health issues, ER visits for those issues, number of calls to crisis lines, number of homeless on shelter waiting lists, size of the waiting list for youth drop-in services and the number of people in opiate treatment centers and on waiting lists for those services.   

The dashboard will also include geographical overlays, so neighborhood-specific information can be displayed. 

According to Michael Schirling, chief of the Burlington Police Department, the dashboard will allow the partners in this endeavor to take a public health – rather than a crisis-management – approach to community health and safety that emphasizes prevention, education, outreach and timely intervention. 

“The dashboard will be a very important addition to our set of management tools,” he said. “It will enable us to become aware of trends early, not six or 18 months in, so we can respond strategically and effectively."

The dashboard, which will be publicly accessible via a web site created by the Center for Rural Studies, will also provide ongoing data over time that will help evaluate the efficacy of services being provided, Schirling said.  

“The foundation of a sustainable community is healthy people,” said Charlie Baker, executive director of the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission. “The dashboard is vital to understanding and responding collectively to trending health issues, and the CCRPC is committed to working across sectors to achieve our shared vision for a healthy, inclusive, and prosperous Chittenden County.”

Jane Kolodinsky, director of the Center for Rural Studies, said the center was well equipped  to develop the dashboard.  “We frequently work with large data sets and know how to organize and display information so it can be easily accessed, quickly understand and put to good use,” she said. “We look forward to this project and to helping make Burlington a more responsive and safer community.”

Dashboard based on data gathered in Phase I of project

The dashboard project is Phase II of a project that began in 2014. In Phase I, CAPE worked with 10 pilot communities and their corresponding Regional Rural Development Centers around the country to assess how local decision-makers obtained and used information about community behavioral health trends.

UVM, Burlington and the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission were selected as one of the collaborators for the Phase 1 project, after a nationally competitive process. The information obtained in Phase I will inform the development of the dashboard.

The dashboard being developed at UVM, the only one like it, should be of great interest to other communities, Kolodinsky said.

“Our goal is to build it in such a way that it can be easily replicated by others,” she said.

UVM expects the dashboard will be complete and ready to use by August 2015. 

Michigan State’s CAPE project is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and USDA’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture.

Visit healthbench.info to learn more. Follow the CAPE Project on Twitter and @healthbench or visit their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/healthbench.info.

PUBLISHED

05-05-2015
Jeffrey R. Wakefield