Connections Community of Practice: Membership Information
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who want to learn together through peer-to-peer interaction. Members can share their experience and avoid “re-inventing the wheel” each time they tackle new challenges. By learning from each other, members shorten the learning curve, foster innovation, and expand the knowledge base. Communities of practice have become quite common in the public health arena, as they provide an efficient and effective forum for sharing best practices and providing real-time analysis of alternative methods.
The Connections CoP is designed to support local and state public health departments to integrate child health information systems to improve child health outcomes. Members of the Connections community of practice include public health agencies and other stakeholders engaged in integration projects.
Membership in Connections is open to state and local public health agencies, or other stakeholders interested in the integration of child health information systems. Through a cooperative agreement with HRSA's Maternal Child Health Bureau (MCHB), the Institute provides a broad range of resources for the CoP and its stakeholders. Use this link to an information page: Frequently Asked Questions about Connections.
If you are interested in the integration of child health information systems, and would like to be included in the contact registry for Connections, please click here. The contact registry serves as the mailing list for information about upcoming conference calls, the e-newsletter, and other resources related to child health systems integration.
If you are a current or prospective member of Connections, please designate someone familiar with your integration project to submit a Project Brief form to the Institute. We need only one Project Brief per project. Use this link to access the form, Connections Project Brief.
Interested in joining Connections? Please complete the Project Readiness Assessment form, which describes your agency's readiness for an integration effort within your child health program. Use this link to access the Connections Project Readiness Assessment form.
What is the goal of Connections?
Connections has an overarching goal to increase the adoption and use of integrated health information systems to improve health outcomes for children. We seek to do this by engaging members in the following activities:
- Identifying best practices in the development of integrated child health information system addressing issues of policy, leadership, governance, collaboration, in addition to the technical solutions that lead to improved health outcomes.
- Identifying gaps and barriers in the development of integrated systems, developing strategies, products and activities designed to mitigate or to address the identified obstacles.
- Disseminate materials, products and practices that are developed by the community to the broader audiences of public health, clinical providers, and others interested our work.
The Connections community of practice (CoP) exists to promote the integration of child health information systems in an effort to assist public health agencies and clinicians to share health information that supports improved health outcomes for children. Toward this end, Connections brings together individuals and organizations to learn together and seek solutions to common problems. Focus areas for Connections include addressing issues of policy, leadership, governance, collaboration and technical solutions that lead to interoperability of public health and health care information systems. Each of these activities supports our work as a community of practice and furthers child health within each member's community.
Connections is supported through a cooperative agreement with the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau (HRSA/MCHB).
