Maryland Department of Health
Environmental Health

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​​National Environmental Public Health Tracking Week

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Environmental Public Health Tracking Awareness Week 2023

The Maryland Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Program is celebrating Environmental Public Health Tracking Awareness Week, July 17-21, 2023! 

Explore the topics below and follow #DataforAction and #TAW2023 for more information about how you can use the Maryland Environmental and Health Data Portal - your gateway to environmental and health data resources. You can work with MD EPHT data, tools, resources, and partnerships to assess and evaluate a variety of environment and health topics in Mar​​yland. 

MD EPHT is supported with a cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Environmental Public Health Tracking program, (CDC-RFA-EH17-1702). Click here ​to see what CDC is doing for National Tracking Week 2023.

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Innovation is a keystone of the Maryland Environmental Public Health Tracking (MD EPHT) Program. MD EPHT provides a variety of publicly available resources that contribute to a more complete picture of importa​​​nt environmental he​alth issues and inform public health actions. The MD EPHT Data Portal is a publicly available tool that can be used to view maps of various environmental public health topics in Maryland, including asthma, COPD, climate change, and heart attack. Keep an eye out for Portal updates as we work to add more topics including cancer and air quality, as well as census-tract level data for asthma. You can also visit the Climate Change webpage for information about how the changing climate impacts health outcomes. To view local air quality forecasts and information on what you can do to protect your health and the environment, visit the Air Quality webpage.

To learn more about important issues that affect environmental health, please visit the CDC National Tracking Program  “Powered by Tracking” dashboards, use the  data explorer tool, or access a  variety of resources.


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Everyone deserves the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards. Maryland's Statewide Integrated Health Improvement Strategy (SIHIS) has established goals for public health efforts to reduce the impact of asthma in all children and to reduce historic disparities in asthma between Black children and other children in the state. The new Maryland Childhood Asthma and Lead Management Program (MD-CALM) provides free home visiting services, asthma and lead education, and other resources to help families in need. Check out the Maryland Environmental Public Health Tracking (MD EPHT) Data Portal to learn more about asthma and lead programs in the state. You can also read about lead-related racial disparities in Baltimore City through a StoryMap provided by our partners at the University of Maryland.​​​

Maryland's Environmental Public Health Tracking (MD EPHT) team works with partners to use environmental and health data to evaluate public health processes and support recommendations for improving local health initiatives. The MD EPHT team partnered with the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) and used childhood lead testing data to assess the impacts of lead testing-related policies, COVID-19, and the national changes in the blood lead reference value (BLRV) on the state's testing rates in 2010 through 2020. Visit the Lead Poisoning Prevention page to read the report and learn more about lead poisoning in Maryland. For more information on EPHT data in action and other success stories, visit the CDC's National EPHT website.​​​


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Lung cancer prevention through radon testing and tobacco prevention is one of the priority areas identified in Maryland’s 2021-2025 Comprehensive Cancer Control Plan. Maryland’s Environmental Public Health Tracking (MD EPHT) team works closely with the Maryland Center for Cancer Prevention and Control, the Maryland Tobacco Control Program, and the Maryland Department of the Environment’s (MDE) radon program to prevent lung cancer by providing communities with local radon data, educational resources, and discounted radon test kits. Keep an eye out for Portal updates as we work to add cancer-related topics and a new display featuring Maryland lung cancer data with smoking status.

Maryland’s Environmental Public Health Tracking (MD EPHT) team is collaborating with partners to use health care and public health data to improve health outcomes for Maryland’s children. MD EPHT has partnered with the Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients (CRISP), the state’s health information exchange, to link children who have visited the emergency department or have been hospitalized with moderate to severe asthma with local health department home visiting services. Under one of the first public health use cases, CRISP now sends a direct feed of recently discharged patients with asthma to 11 local health departments on a weekly basis. This has cut down the time between when the child had an asthma exacerbation and when the local health department contact’s the child’s family about home visiting services from months to weeks. Additionally, implementing this referral system with CRISP has been successful in maintaining enrollment in these services and is helping the state to meet its population health goals under the Statewide Integrated Health Improvement Strategy (SIHIS).