The State Systems Development Initiative (SSDI) Grant Program provides South Dakota with a platform and resources to strengthen the development and expansion of data capacity for performance measure reporting in the state’s Title V Program. With the support of SSDI, the state conducts targeted activities to meet the greatest collective needs based on the MCH Needs Assessment to implement evidence-based approaches. The SSDI and Title V Programs conduct ongoing checks throughout the grant cycles to ensure progress is being made and new challenges and gaps are identified and addressed.  

The SSDI Grant Program supports a full time MCH Epidemiologist (epi) who establishes and maintains routine communication with the SSDI project team, Office of Child and Family Services (OCFS) managers and program managers, and contractors. This is accomplished by: 1) data sharing at quarterly MCH Team meetings and monthly OCFS manager meetings and; 2) sharing data and epidemiology updates at monthly Division of Family and Community Health Administrator’s meetings by the Office of Health Statistics and the epidemiology staff within the division and; 3) data sharing through agreements with the DOH Office of Vital Records to review maternal and child deaths in the state. The epidemiologist also oversees the MCH cross-cutting domain focused on data sharing and collaboration. In 2021 additional epidemiologists were contracted for OCFS. These epis focus on Child Death Review data, data analysis, program evaluation, and additional MCH data projects.  

The MCH team has been trained on implementing evidence-based strategies and measures to continuously evaluate the progress being made toward each domain’s objectives through activities outlined in the action plans. The MCH epidemiologist checks in regularly with MCH domain leaders to assess progress toward objectives and evidence-based strategy measures. The MCH epi has also contributed to the development of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that was implemented office-wide in OCFS in January 2022. The EHR will provide a new opportunity for the MCH team to analyze data from programs and services and evaluate the impact of these services on health outcomes. 

Other methods of evaluation include MCH staff utilizing infant mortality data from vital statistics, PRAMS, and infant death review to evaluate programs focused on safe sleep. In 2020 infant death review expanded to include all child deaths up to age 13 and was renamed to Child Death Review (CDR). This data will eventually be used to determine leading causes of natural and accidental deaths and evaluate programs and education focused on injury prevention. The CDR team has also begun looking at life stressors and social determinants of health which may have been a factor in some deaths.  Another recent development is the DOH’s addition of a maternal mortality case abstractor in 2021 and the establishment of a maternal mortality review committee to review maternal deaths in the state as well.  In 2023 this role will transition to a Prevention Services Coordinator and will oversee both maternal and child death reviews.

The SSDI Grant Program has supported several projects, products, and resource materials that support State Title V program efforts in addressing its MCH priority needs. In 2021, the MCH and OCFS epis took a Tableau training on creating data dashboards. As a result of this training, an infant mortality dashboard was created for the SD DOH website https://doh.sd.gov/statistics/infant-mortality. The MCH epi also hosted a summer intern that focused on creating a plan for officewide data reporting and visualization that includes overarching MCH outcomes and program specific data. The intern laid the groundwork for the MCH epi and WIC data specialist to begin building an internal data dashboard for staff to use.  In 2022, the MCH Epidemiologist and WIC data specialist finalized the MCH data dashboard and posted it to the internal knowledge base site for Office of Child and Family Services (OCFS) staff use.

SSDI has also supported several data presentations and reports. In 2022, this included 2020 PRAMS data reports, newsletters and listservs sharing MCH Child Health data, and infant and child health data presented at an MCH Child workgroup meeting, Preventable Death Committee, Safe Sleep Workgroup, East River Child Death Review, and West River Child Death Review. The 2016-2020 Infant Mortality and Prevention Report was released and shared with partners through a variety of methods. Additional projects include the creation of a spreadsheet to track the life course social determinants of health factors identified during CDR and Maternal Mortality Review and development of a socio spatial tool to further gain information about the possible contribution of locations lived to women’s deaths. The epidemiologists have also joined Tribal calls between the American Indian Tribes and the Department of Health to discuss rising infant mortality rates in South Dakota.  Detailed descriptions of these publications and presentations can be found in the SPM 3 annual report.

The MCH Epidemiologist, along with a contracted consultant with expertise in needs assessment and health equity, lead the MCH Five Year Needs Assessment. They created a steering committee that met regularly to provide guidance and support on data collection related to MCH domains and indicators needed for home visiting. Data collection related to needs assessment planning and implementation included domain specific data briefs, adolescent and community-based surveys, and family centered focus groups.  

A cross-cutting domain focused on data sharing and collaboration was created from the Five-Year Needs Assessment. This domain is led by the MCH Epidemiologist and has a dedicated workgroup comprised of epidemiologists from DOH, Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board, Missouri Breaks Research, SDSU, USD, and Medicaid. This workgroup is focused on providing access to timely, reliable data, developing reports that highlight health inequities in SD, analyzing data to assess social determinants of health and other underlying factors that play a role in morbidity and mortality, and increasing collaboration around American Indian data between state and tribal partners.