An information manager for the Assessment Protocol for Excellence in Public Health

The Assessment Protocol for Excellence in Public Health (APEXPH) is a method for comprehensive public health planning that can be implemented by state and local health departments. Many local health departments have limited resources for the data analysis and synthesis needed for APEXPH. To facilitate the implementation of APEXPH in Michigan, we used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Epi Info software package to develop an APEXPH information manager (CDC-AIM) for use by the 50 local health departments in that state. This report describes our methods for formatting, compressing, and presenting data. Examples of tables are provided for demographics by age and sex, numbers of deaths, years of potential life lost, crude mortality rates, and perinatal indicators such as low birthweight. Areas where additional work is needed to further improve CDC-AIM are discussed. Our experience in Michigan suggests that CDC-AIM potentially is an extremely helpful tool to assist state and local health departments in working with their communities to establish public health program plans based on mortality, morbidity, and risk-factor data.