Office of Public Health Initiatives
The ATHN Office of Public Health Initiatives (OPHI) aims to leverage ATHN’s capabilities to support medically underserved populations by working to strengthen ATHN’s partnerships throughout the blood disorders community. In addition to collaborating to ensure the success of ATHN’s current federally funded programs, OPHI aims to establish a Health Equity Program and expand ATHN’s focus on sickle cell disease. In the future, OPHI will explore health policy and qualitative research.
What Is Health Equity?
Health equity is the act of removing societal and/or political obstacles to health care to provide everyone a fair and just opportunity to access health services and be healthy. OPHI aims to establish a Health Equity Program with the goal to prioritize equity in all of our research functions, ultimately improving data collection efforts and data quality for the blood disorders community.
National Hemophilia Program Coordinating Center (NHPCC)
The NHPCC supports a collaborative and integrated national infrastructure of regional hemophilia networks to promote access and quality of care for people with blood disorders. The NHPCC’s quality improvement program uses evidence-based practices to improve access to care, transition of care, patient engagement, and more. The NHPCC is funded by a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) cooperative agreement through ATHN, its sponsoring organization. ATHN’s OPHI team manages the NHPCC.
Community Counts
This federal project is led by ATHN in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Hemophilia Treatment Center Network. Its aim is to collect data on people with bleeding and clotting disorders and increase knowledge, monitor trends, identify risk factors, and more. In 2020, the CDC renewed ATHN’s 5-year cooperative agreement to continue the Community Counts project and:
- Strengthen collaboration with treatment centers
- Continue data and specimen collection and transfer
- Evaluate data quality and improvement
- Share information with the community
For more information, contact ATHN at support@athn.org.