OSE Mission
The mission of OSE is to provide leadership, partnership, and support in the provision and translation of data that is accessible, understandable, relevant, and actionable to promote health and health equity, by leading with racial equity, in alignment with BCHAP’s mission.
We promote health and racial equity through data.
OSE Core Functions
In partnership with BCHAP programs, OSE has 6 core functions:
- Strategic planning: Inform decision making, including prioritization, resource allocation, and needs assessment for equitable programs and policies,
- Surveillance: Identify key health issues and trends for the Commonwealth; develop and maintain surveillance systems,
- Evaluation: Measure program progress, successes and impacts; grant reporting; accountability of sites and grantees,
- Monitor and evaluate feedback to ensure high quality data collection, analysis and program implementation,
- Capacity building: Support our partners in meaningful data use through collaboration, resource development, and training, and
- Build evidence base: Identify best practices; conduct research; create new tools; share learnings from novel practices, policies & programs.
Examples of how we center equity in everything we do include connecting health inequities to root causes & identifying opportunities for action; identifying who has been disproportionally impacted and who is “invisible” in the data; ensuring we are making an equitable impact; identifying what works and for whom and when there are unintended consequences; building a network of partners that use data to fight structural racism & other structural oppressions; and centering communities who have been left out of solution.
Data requests
OSE supports the public by answering data requests to help inform community program needs. They can also help direct outside agencies requesting access to data sets to the IRB application and review process.