The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #38862

Nhien Luong, MPH¹, Julie Solomon, PhD², Mohammad M Rahman, MD, DrPH¹, Guadalupe S Olivas, PhD¹, Aimee Reedy, MPH¹, Stephanie D. Golz, MPH¹, and Sulin Wilkinson¹. (1) Santa Clara County Public Health Department, 3003 Moorpark Avenue, San Jose, CA 95128, 408-885-4221, nhien.luong@hhs.co.santa-clara.ca.us, (2) Sociometrics Corporation, 170 State Street, Ste 260, Los Altos, CA 94022

In 1997, the Santa Clara County (California) Public Health Department’s Violence Prevention Program developed a Countywide Violence Prevention Action Plan to reduce and prevent violence. One of the components of the plan is a Violence Prevention Information Library (VPIL), a data system for the ongoing collection, sharing, and analysis of violence-related data. VPIL will be a data warehouse that will bring together, through partnership building, multiple and diverse databases in order to transform them into a meaningful profile of the scope and magnitude of the violence problem in Santa Clara County, and facilitate the evaluation of violence prevention efforts. VPIL will focus on four priority areas: (1) relationship violence, (2) alcohol related violence, (3) firearm related violence, and (4) youth violence.

After reviewing the history and purpose of VPIL, this paper will: (1) Describe the methods, challenges, and responses of building partnerships among health and human services, criminal justice, and educational sectors. (2) Describe the technical challenges and epidemiological issues encountered in building the data warehouse, and describe how these problems were addressed. (3) Provide an overview of technical specifications and functionality of the VPIL data warehouse. (4) Highlight the utility of data linking from different source systems for violence profiling and violence prevention evaluation.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this session, the participant will be able to

• Understand the challenges to the intersectoral partnership building process.
• Understand the technological and epidemiological challenges/barriers associated with data warehouse development.
• Identify the technology requirements needed to build a data warehouse on violence data.
• Recognize the utility of data linking for profiling the scope and magnitude of violence and evaluating prevention programs.

Keywords: Violence Prevention, Information Technology

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.