At OMNI, when faced with a question, we rely heavily on our core value of Inquiry. Inquiry for us doesn't only mean hitting the books and academic journals but searching for answers and learning from our clients and partners, especially when discussing equity and a community's historical context. We recently developed a resource for the Virginia State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup (SEOW) that highlighted the concept of health disparities and how data can be used to recognize, understand, and reduce health disparities in Virginia. As we began our work, what seemed like a straightforward question, how to define and visualize health disparity, turned out to be much more complicated, and so we turned to the SEOW members for guidance. Deriving the appropriate definition for this resource taught us a great deal about both the concept of health disparities itself and a powerful lesson about our roles as evaluators and researchers.

Facilitated by OMNI, The Virginia State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup (SEOW) is developing a set of data spotlights to feature behavioral health-related data sources across the state. The goal of the data spotlights is to support Virginia's substance use prevention, treatment, and recovery efforts.

To promote cross-collaboration and help break down data silos, OMNI schedules data presentations at each of the quarterly SEOW meeting. One SEOW member presents to the group on the information they collect, including data collection methods, context, overarching trends, benefits and limitations of the data, and use and external access. OMNI then takes information from these presentations to develop a one-page data spotlight which outlines: