Modernizing Systems to Connect Data with Our Communities to Answer What Matters Most

July holds two observances that rarely appear in the same sentence, UV Safety Awareness Month and National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, also recognized as BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month. They appear unconnected until you look more closely at who carries the heaviest burden of each. Underneath both sits the same public health informatics question: when something happens in our communities, do our data systems simply signal to us that something has happened or do they provide the connected insights needed to see the whole person and whole community with the full context for us to mount an informed science-driven response? 

Skin cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in the United States. About one in five Americans will develop it by age 70, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation. That single number flattens a wide gap underneath it. Black patients are diagnosed with melanoma at a late stage more than three times as often as white patients, with 52 percent of Black patients and 26 percent of Hispanic patients presenting with advanced-stage disease, compared with 16 percent of white patients. The downstream effect shows up in survival: roughly 70 percent five-year survival for Black patients compared with 92 to 94 percent for white patients. That gap doesn't end at diagnosis. A recent meta-analysis found that close to 30 percent of melanoma patients experience clinically significant anxiety and 18 percent experience depression, both well above general population rates. Patients diagnosed later in the disease, who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic patients, carry that burden longer and with fewer resources, since later-stage treatment typically means more aggressive intervention, longer recovery, and a harder prognosis to live with psychologically. National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month exists because behavioral health support is least available to the communities that need it most. Skin cancer outcomes are one more place where that holds true, and informatics is one of the few tools that can make the connection visible instead of assumed. In many cases, we are challenged by how effectively data are connected, contextualized, and translated into action. Modernized, connected systems can help bridge the information gap across public health, healthcare providers, community partners, and trusted messengers, enabling a more coordinated response to persistent disparities.  

There is real progress on the front end. The SAFE Sunscreen Standards Act, signed into law in November 2025, gives the FDA a clearer process for approving new sunscreen ingredients for the first time since 1999. That modernization is overdue, but it is a regulatory fix, not a data fix. It will not necessarily connect the changes in policy with the downstream impacts on melanoma incidence without the ability to link together sunscreen use, healthcare data on skin cancer screening, and cancer registry data.  

Public health has already shown what data built for impact looks like. The electronic case reporting program prioritized Federally Qualified Health Centers in its rollout specifically because those centers serve Black, Hispanic, and low-income patients. More than 1,000 FQHC sites are now connected and sending real-time case data instead of relying on the manual reporting that used to leave these communities underrepresented in the data. That is what it looks like when real-time case data are reported to the people who need it; built into the infrastructure from the start instead of added on after the fact.  

Wildfires test the same principle from the environmental side. When the January 2025 Los Angeles County fires ignited, the county's syndromic surveillance system, already drawing from emergency departments covering roughly 90 percent of the county, recorded an eightfold increase in wildfire-related ED visits within days. Separate research using Kaiser Permanente Southern California health records found a roughly 35 percent rise in virtual visits for cardiovascular and respiratory symptoms in the most exposed communities that same week. The county's syndromic surveillance system answered the question of what was happening in near-real time. The equity picture came separately, from researchers going back through Kaiser Permanente records after the fact. The surveillance infrastructure itself was not built to show whether outdoor workers, low-income households, or communities already carrying higher asthma and cardiovascular risk were absorbing a disproportionate share of that spike. Building that visibility into the data and systems from the start, rather than reconstructing it through research after a crisis, is the kind of informatics work that connects emergency response to health equity. 

JPHIT members are spending July's awareness month pointing at the same gap from different directions. Skin cancer data alone without contextual factors show only a part of the bigger picture on the impacts to communities. Syndromic surveillance emergency department visits benefit from the integration with or inclusion of occupational and at-risk chronic condition data to understand health effects on those most exposed. Behavioral health systems remain hardest to reach for the populations carrying the heaviest physical and psychological burden. Dashboards in the absence of modernized systems won't close that gap. Routine reporting and connecting the data across systems will; getting community-level detail to the agencies, providers, and communities who need it so public health can see who was affected, what happened, and start asking why.