Tackling intrastate policy surveillance challenges in Indiana
The design, interpretation, and enforcement of county and municipal laws significantly affect local public health. But accessing those laws can be difficult. A study by Indiana University researchers found that unlike Indiana state laws, which are collected, catalogued by topic, and kept regularly updated in centralized, publicly available electronic databases, laws in about half of all Indiana counties were not online, or if they were online, they weren't necessarily up to date. This means that in Indiana, there is no comprehensive, up-to-date central source that can be used to study how different local governments respond to similar health-related concerns.