The Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) is pleased to announce an upcoming DataSpeak program titled Vitally Important: Improving the Timeliness of Vital Statistics to Advance MCH. Vital statistics—the data and health indicators collected from vital records on births and deaths—are an important source of data for answering national and state health questions. Birth and death records allow states to track maternal, fetal, and infant mortality, adverse birth outcomes, delivery characteristics, and maternal risk factors, among other statistics. Improving the timeliness of these records is essential to making sure they are most useful for monitoring and advancing public health efforts in real time. This program will focus on how states are working to improve vital statistics timeliness and data sharing, and how this is helping to inform and improve programs and health outcomes for women and infants.

We will feature three speakers:

• Patricia W. Potrzebowski, PhD, Executive Director of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems, will present on the importance and need for improving timeliness of vital records data. Dr. Potrzebowski will review a number of efforts underway to make vital statistics more current and thus more useful for public health program purposes.
  
  
• Glenn Copeland, MBA, State Registrar for the Michigan Department of Community Health, will present a summary of the work being done to provide more timely data on infant mortality in Michigan in order to better inform programs working to improve outcomes, with a focus on the Collaborative Improvement & Innovation Network (COIIN) to Reduce Infant Mortality.
  
  
• John Paulson, Data Center Supervisor at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Ohio Department of Health, will discuss how Ohio compiles, augments, and uses the data in its public health data warehouse with a focus on using the State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events (STEVE) System.