RWJF Offers Recommendations on How to Improve Public Health Data Systems

Less than half of all Americans have a great deal of trust in state and local health departments, according to a 2021 poll by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The poll didn’t investigate the causes for this distrust, but one factor looms large. When citizens wanted answers, a non-centralized, disjointed public health data infrastructure too often created confusion, opening the door to misinformation. As the push to improve public health data intensifies, RWJF has released recommendations from a commission it created to consider how public health data systems can do a better job of preventing the health inequities laid bare by the pandemic.