What began as a way for MCH Strategic Data to better serve customers during the pandemic has morphed into a crucial resource for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others. MCH's newest contract with the CDC continues through the end of 2022.
Sweet Springs, Missouri-based MCH, which has an 18-person office in Overland Park, sells marketing data and provides analytics services to companies in the education, health care, religion and government sectors. Its biggest industry is education. So when the pandemic hit in 2020, Chief Information Officer Kelly Holder devised a plan to start regularly surveying more than 15,000 school districts nationwide to learn about their latest plans, such as going remote or restricting sports activities. A number of clients, for example, sell athletic equipment and needed to know how to budget for the year. MCH shared its data for free with clients so they could strategically plan.
The survey questions evolved along with the pandemic, and MCH teamed up with Redlands, California-based geographic information system company Esri to transform the real-time data into a publicly available Covid-19 map.
"It immediately caught the eye of the CDC," Holder said. "We let them formulate a lot of questions that would be of interest to them. ... It's been widely used by the government."
Initially, the CDC's big fear was that schools would become superspreaders, he said, but the data showed otherwise and helped prove the effectiveness of wearing masks.
When MCH stopped collecting the data in January 2021, the CDC contacted MCH and asked it to continue. It led to a roughly one-year contract with the CDC's funding arm, the CDC Foundation, and in 2022, a contract directly with the CDC, which uses the data for its Learning Modalities Map that tracks which districts are in-person, hybrid or remote. MCH's website includes additional data on aspects such as mask policies and who's required to wear a mask, vaccine status and whether Covid-19 testing is offered on-site.
School districts have used MCH's data to view what other districts are doing and shape their policy decisions. Academic researchers and other government agencies also have used the data for research projects, Holder said. MCH's data recently was cited during a Senate committee hearing and has appeared in major media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico.
"It's been a wild ride. It's been great for the company. You can't buy this kind of press," he said. "Our CEO and owner put a great deal of trust in me to do all this (because) MCH shelled out a good deal of money for the first nine months before someone else started paying the bill. ... There's not a lot of times you can say my work's directly leading to bettering society and helping combat Covid. That, to me, has been the biggest thing."
