Using Innovations in Big Data and Technology to Address the High Rate of Infant Mortality in Greater Columbus Ohio

Franklin County, Ohio, home of the state's capital at Columbus, has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country at 8.3 deaths per 1,000 live births. As outlined in a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (2016), the U.S. lags behind in many important measures of population health, including infant mortality, despite the fact that one-fifth of our dollars are spent on healthcare. While the data needed to address these important public health problems are available, to date we have not seen adequate investment in informatics approaches to combine and analyze these multilevel (e.g., individual lifestyle factors, neighborhood characteristics) data. The current planning project represents an effort to plan (with an intent to implement) just such an approach to address the high rate of infant mortality in Greater Columbus and nationwide. As the recent winner of the Department of Transportation's Smart Cities Challenge, Columbus already has a well-developed plan to employ technology to improve local transportation options, which is anticipated to ameliorate some contributing factors such as lack of access prenatal and other health care. The financial support from this and follow-up grants will permit us to expand that effort and leverage technological advances to further identify and design interventions to address risk factors for poor maternal and infant health outcomes. Further, by including students and other trainees in our work, we will be training the next generation of scientists to develop innovative solutions to address complex societal problems.

The objectives of this one-year planning project are to: 1) identify data gaps that present local barriers to achieving optimal maternal and infant health and their effect on proximate causes of infant mortality in the community; 2) align with key stakeholders and partners in the community with a goal to identify opportunities where technology, especially connectivity and mobility, could be leveraged to address barriers and speed-up progress; and 3) utilize our technological and content expertise to design and implement novel interventions for improving maternal and infant health. Since 2014 there have been a number of local efforts to address Franklin County's high rate of infant mortality to no avail. As such, there is a dire need for a coordinated novel multidisciplinary approach. The primary focus and intellectual contribution of this planning grant is to work closely with stakeholders to plan strategies to identify the key contributors of infant mortality in Franklin County (i.e., likely specific social determinants of health) and to develop novel interventions driven by innovations in BIGDATA technology.