CDC intends to award on a Sole Source basis to Univ. of Ala. Project is to understand whether any organizational or regulatory/statutory issues affected the states' ability to move emergency H1N1 grant funds to local health depts.

The proposed contractor, to our knowledge, is the only organization that has compiled detailed information on how public health preparedness programs are organized. They completed this work under contract with CDC, which built upon work they were already conducting. The project was quite successful, yielding a nuanced taxonomy of public health preapredness programs that shows promise in helping explain differences in spending patterns by how the preparedness unit is organized. The results will be published in a peer-reviewed publication. The proposed contractor has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals focusing on the organization of public health and legislation, as well as spent a considerable amount of time in the field observing public health preparedness at the local level. They have also drafted exercise scenarios for local health departments as well as evaluated those exercises, which further puts them in a strong position to understand the structure of public health preparedness at the state and local level. As a result of this experince, the contractor has a unique database of preparedness programs organization, as well as unique insight into how variation in organization may effect the ability to move funds from the state to the local level. They also possess an in-depth knowledge on where relevant, publicly-available information on legislation and regulations exist for each state. This database and knowledge puts the proposed contractor in a unique position to analyze organizational data on PHER expenditures recently reported to CDC as well as refine, as necessary, their existing taxonomy. The will also be able to help CDC select up to 9 health departments for in-depth case studies. It would take another contractor well over a year to collect the information on public health preparedness programs that the proposed contractor already possesses.