Public health policy interventions are associated with many important public health achievements. To provide public health practitioners and decision makers with practical approaches for examining and employing evidence-based public health (EBPH) policy interventions, we describe the characteristics and benefits that distinguish EBPH policy interventions from programmatic interventions. These characteristics include focusing on health at a population level, focusing on upstream drivers of health, and involving less individual action than programmatic interventions. The benefits of EBPH policy interventions include more sustained effects on health than many programs and an enhanced ability to address health inequities. Early childhood education and universal preschool provide a case example that illustrates the distinction between EBPH policy and programmatic interventions. This review serves as the foundation for 3 concepts that support the effective use of public health policy interventions: applying core component thinking to understand the population health effects of EBPH policy interventions; understanding the influence of existing policies, policy supports, and the context in which a particular policy is implemented on the effectiveness of that policy; and employing a systems thinking approach to identify leverage points where policy implementation can have a meaningful effect.

A growing body of literature uses the concept of core components to better understand small-scale programmatic interventions. Instead of interventions being viewed as unitary "black boxes," interventions are viewed as configurations of core components, which are the parts of interventions that carry their causal potential and therefore need to be reproduced with fidelity to produce the intended effect. To date, the concept of core components has not been as widely applied to public health policy interventions as it has to programmatic interventions. The purpose of this topical review is to familiarize public health practitioners and policy makers with the concept of core components as applied to public health policy interventions. Raising the profile of core component thinking can foster mindful adaptation and implementation of public health policy interventions while encouraging further research to enhance the supporting evidence base. We present 3 types of multilevel interactions in which the core components of a public health policy intervention produce effects at the population level by (1) seeking to directly affect individual behavior, (2) facilitating adoption of programmatic interventions by intermediaries, and (3) encouraging intermediaries to take action that can shape changes in upstream drivers of population health. Changing the unit of analysis from whole policies to core components can provide a basis for understanding how policies work and for facilitating novel evidence-generating strategies and rapid evidence reviews that can inform future adaptation efforts.

CONTEXT: Public health policy can play an important role in improving public health outcomes. Accordingly, there has been an increasing emphasis by policy makers on identifying and implementing evidence-informed public health policy interventions. PROGRAM OR POLICY: Growth and refinement of the field of research assessing the impact of legal interventions on health outcomes, known as legal epidemiology, prompted this review of studies on the relationship between laws and health or economic outcomes. IMPLEMENTATION: Authors systematically searched 8 major literature databases for all English language journal articles that assessed the effect of a law on health and economic outcomes published between January 1, 2009, and September 18, 2019. This search generated 12 570 unique articles 177 of which met inclusion criteria. The team conducting the systematic review was a multidisciplinary team that included health economists and public health policy researchers, as well as public health lawyers with expertise in legal epidemiological research methods. The authors identified and assessed the types of methods used to measure the laws' health impact. EVALUATION: In this review, the authors examine how legal epidemiological research methods have been described in the literature as well as trends among the studies. Overall, 3 major themes emerged from this study: (1) limited variability in the sources of the health data across the studies, (2) limited differences in the methodological approaches used to connect law to health outcomes, and (3) lack of transparency surrounding the source and quality of the legal data relied upon. DISCUSSION: Through highlighting public health law research methodologies, this systematic review may inform researchers, practitioners, and lawmakers on how to better examine and understand the impacts of legal interventions on health and economic outcomes. Findings may serve as a source of suggested practices in conducting legal epidemiological outcomes research and identifying conceptual and method-related gaps in the literature.

CONTEXT: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a long history of using high-quality science to drive public health action that has improved the health, safety, and well-being of people in the United States and globally. To ensure scientific quality, manuscripts authored by CDC staff are required to undergo an internal review and approval process known as clearance. During 2022, CDC launched a scientific clearance transformation initiative to improve the efficiency of the clearance process while ensuring scientific quality. PROGRAM: As part of the scientific clearance transformation initiative, a group of senior scientists across CDC developed a framework called the Domains of Excellence for High-Quality Publications (DOE framework). The framework includes 7 areas ("domains") that authors can consider for developing high-quality and impactful scientific manuscripts: Clarity, Scientific Rigor, Public Health Relevance, Policy Content, Ethical Standards, Collaboration, and Health Equity. Each domain includes multiple quality elements, highlighting specific key considerations within. IMPLEMENTATION: CDC scientists are expected to use the DOE framework when conceptualizing, developing, revising, and reviewing scientific products to support collaboration and to ensure the quality and impact of their scientific manuscripts. DISCUSSION: The DOE framework sets expectations for a consistent standard for scientific manuscripts across CDC and promotes collaboration among authors, partners, and other subject matter experts. Many aspects have broad applicability to the public health field at large and might be relevant for others developing high-quality manuscripts in public health science. The framework can serve as a useful reference document for CDC authors and others in the public health community as they prepare scientific manuscripts for publication and dissemination.

PURPOSE: The U.S. federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is often considered the most effective antipoverty program for families in the U.S., leading to a variety of improved outcomes such as educational attainment, work incentives, economic activity, income, and health benefits for mothers, infants and children. State EITC supplements to the federal credit can significantly enhance the magnitude of this intervention. In this paper we advance EITC and health research by: 1) describing the diffusion of state EITC policies over 40 years, 2) presenting patterns in important EITC policy dimensions across space and time, and 3) disseminating a robust data set to advance future research by policy analysts and scientists. METHODS: We used current public health law research methods to systematically collect, conduct textual legal analysis, and numerically code all EITC legislative changes from 1980 through 2020 in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. RESULTS: First, the pattern of diffusion across states and time shows initial introductions during the 1990s in the Midwest, then spreading to the Northeast, with more recent expansions in the West and South. Second, differences by state and time of important policy dimensions are evident, including size of credit and refundability. Third, state EITC benefits vary considerably by household structure. CONCLUSION: Continued research on health outcomes is warranted to capture the full range of potential beneficial effects of EITCs on family and child wellbeing. Lawyers and policy analysts can collaborate with epidemiologists and economists on other high-quality empirical studies to assess the many dimensions of policy and law that potentially affect the social determinants of health.