The New England HIV Implementation Science Network Presents "Racial Equity and Anti-Racism in Public Health Data Collection and Implications for HIV"

OVERVIEW

Data integration by local and state governments is undertaken for the public good: by breaking down program silos, practitioners and policymakers can address the interconnected needs of families and communities more effectively and holistically. And yet, many of the institutions engaged in the important work of data integration have not examined and acknowledged structural bias in their history, or the ways in which that bias is often baked into data as a result of systemic inequities in the development and administration of policies and programs.

Integrated administrative data increasingly provide the raw materials for analytics, yet racial equity is, at best, a peripheral consideration for data access and use. This session presents findings from A Toolkit for Centering Racial Equity Throughout Data Integration and AISP’s Equity in Practice Learning Community. The toolkit was created through a collaborative deliberation process and includes site-based examples of work in action towards racial equity alongside examples of promising and problematic practice for administrative data reuse in government and human services. We will discuss concepts from the Toolkit, including equity implications across the data life cycle with HIV specific examples to discern risk versus benefit of data access and use. Staff of health departments and members of planning bodies involved in collecting and accessing potentially sensitive data may find particular benefit in attending.

PRESENTER

Amy Hawn Nelson is Research Faculty and Director of Training and Technical Assistance for Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (AISP), an initiative of the University of Pennsylvania that helps state and local governments collaborate and responsibly use data to improve lives. Dr. Hawn Nelson is a community engaged researcher and has presented and written extensively on data integration and intersectional topics related to educational equity. She is a lead author of Yes, No, Maybe? Legal & Ethical Considerations for Informed Consent in Data Sharing and Integration (2023), Finding a Way Forward: How to create a strong legal framework for data integration (2022), A Toolkit for Centering Racial Equity Throughout Data Integration (2020), and AISP’s Introduction to Data Sharing & Integration (2020).