Better citizen health is critical economic medicine for the Delta Regional Authority (DRA), an organization focused on growing prosperity for 240 counties and parishes in eight Mississippi Delta states. Populations in many of the region's counties and parishes peaked before 1980, and 238 of them have per capita incomes at or below the national average, according to the DRA.

The DRA's Healthy Delta program aims to change that by targeting citizen diabetes using early medical intervention. A call center and database will power that strategy.

The organization's theory goes that a work force can't become more prosperous if it is not as healthy as competing work forces. Roughly 10 percent of DRA citizens suffer from diabetes compared to a 7 percent average for the United States as a whole, according to the DRA.

The organization uses marketing campaigns to report potential symptoms of diabetes to a special call center. The DRA also collects this information at health fairs. Call center and fair workers refer citizens to health-care providers. The organization feeds this information into a database. The DRA hopes that in a few years, the database will enable states to reduce diabetes by revealing symptoms they can catch earlier.