BRFSS and PRAMS Telephone Data Collection Services

The Mississippi State Department of Health is seeking a Contractor to perform its telephone data collection services. The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) collects information related to chronic health conditions, use of preventive services, and health behaviors from non-institutionalized adults aged 18 years and older in Mississippi. Its data are collected through telephone interviews performed by a contractor. The Contractor will collect random sample telephone survey data related to health risk factors and conditions on the adult population in Mississippi for the BRFSS Program. The contractor will be responsible for obtaining a sufficient sample from the CDC to collect the targeted number of complete interviews, training interviewers on the new survey instrument, completing the required number of interviews in accordance with survey guidelines, performing ongoing quality control of the survey collection, running data edits on the collected data and correcting any errors, submitting the data to CDC within 30 days of the end of the survey year and working with CDC to correct any problem that may be identified with respect to the data. The sample size for the MS BRFSS survey is between 4,000 and 5,000 completes annually. The Contractor must have at least 7 years of recent experience conducting BRFSS data collection activities and must have successfully collected BRFSS data for at least 10 states/sites. PRAMS is the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. It is a joint surveillance project between state, territorial, or local health departments and CDC's Division of Reproductive Health. PRAMS was developed in 1987 to reduce infant morbidity and mortality by influencing maternal behaviors before, during, and immediately after live birth. The purpose of PRAMS is to find out why some infants are born healthy and others are not. The survey asks new mothers questions about their pregnancy and their new infant. The questions give us important information about the mother and the infant and help us learn more about the impacts of health and behaviors. PRAMS uses three modes of data collection. Surveys can be completed by mailed questionnaire, telephone interview, and, starting with the 2023 birth cohort, online, using a web survey module. Selected women are first contacted by mail. If there is no response to repeated mailings, they are contacted and interviewed by telephone. Each month at the jurisdiction level, a stratified sample is randomly drawn from the current birth certificate file. For each of these monthly samples, or "batches," a series of mailings begins 2 to 4 months after delivery. This is to allow new mothers time to respond to questions about the early postpartum period. With all mailings, an invitation is sent to complete the survey by web. Telephone follow-up begins for nonrespondents after the mailing of the last questionnaire packet. The calling period continues for 2 to 4 weeks, and up to 15 calls are made for each viable telephone number. The sample size for the MS PRAMS survey is between 1,500 and 2,500 completes annually.