About the Program

Overview
For more than a decade, the Environmental Public Health Tracking Program has collected, integrated, and analyzed non-infectious disease and environmental data from a nationwide network of partners. The purpose of this Program is to deliver information and data to protect the nation from health issues arising from or directly related to environmental factors.
The Tracking Program strives to achieve its vision of Healthy Informed Communities by empowering environmental and public health practitioners, healthcare providers, community members, policy makers, and others to make information-driven decisions that affect their health.
At the local, state, and national levels, the Tracking Program uses a network of people and information systems to deliver a core set of health, exposure, and hazards data, information summaries, and tools to enable analysis, visualization and reporting of insights drawn from data.
In this Environmental Health Nexus Webinar subject matter experts discuss how CDC’s National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network delivers information to track environmental health factors over time and improve the health of communities with data, visualizations, and interactive tools.
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This CDC Public Health Grand Rounds presentation discusses how CDC’s Tracking Program has made strides in addressing the lack of environmental health data, and how the program has informed public health decision making and action at the state and local levels.
- Tracking: Better Information for Better HealthExplore infographics to learn more about how CDC’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Network delivers better information for better health.
- National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program Strategic Plan, 2016-2020 [PDF - 5 MB]
- "Direct from CDC" article series, 'Journal of Environmental Health'
- Tracking Fact Sheet
- Helping Public Health Leaders Make Informed Decisions
- Conceptual Diagram [PPT - 406 KB]
A Brief History
In 2001, the Pew Environmental Health Commission issued a report calling for the establishment of an environmental public health tracking network that would monitor the level of burden from environmentally related disease. In 2002, Congress appropriated funds to CDC to establish the Environmental Public Health Tracking Program.
The program is the first national effort to provide the United States with standardized health, environmental, and hazard data from multiple information systems that includes linkage of these data as part of regular surveillance activities. More…
Read the full Pew report: America’s Environmental Health Gap: Why the Country Needs a Nationwide Health Tracking Network