IMNashville : Promoting Academic / Community Partnerships to Eliminate Health Disparities

“IM Nashville” is dedicated to promoting and supporting academic and community partners to work together to improve the health and eliminate health disparities among the residents of Nashville/Davidson County by enabling joint research, planning, action, evaluation, and public policy efforts. This website brings interactive, user friendly, research and community geographic information systems (GIS) mapping tools that can be used by lay people, public and non-profit agencies, and academic researchers to encourage collaboration in assessing local health needs, examining health within the context of the natural, built, and social environments, and developing implementing and evaluating the outcomes of targeted interventions.  The specific aim of this website is to speed up the process of developing, conducting, translating, and disseminating research results that will lead to improved health and a reduction of health disparities among the residents of Nashville/Davidson County. Community GIS also builds upon the following goals:

• Goal One: Enhance our research capacity for collecting, storing and analyzing data on the natural, built, and social environments, as well as their effects on health disparities through community – based participatory research.

• Goal Two: Expand health disparities research training and career development opportunities by recruiting a post – doctoral fellow to study health disparities among minority and low social and economic populations.

• Goal Three: Engage investigators and community members to collaborate in all phases of health disparities research, including data collection, study design and implementation, and findings dissemination.

The purpose of IM Nashville is for researchers and community members to come together to share data, ideas, experiences, and expertise for the betterment of all communities involved.  It is a public website that provides the opportunity for community groups to input and/or view data.