You will be asked to explore the issues surrounding program evaluation for community health/population health programs, the importance of having an effective plan to obtain high quality data and information to make decisions, as well as issues surrounding the sharing of such information. This Case Study is for a program evaluation designed to determine whether a direct service intervention program is effective.

Part 1: Program Evaluation (Does not use EHR Go)

Instructions

Answer the questions below based on the Casey Study provided in your course – see Week 8 course content to download the Case Study. While this is not a formal paper, please be sure to cite your sources (you must cite a minimum of at least 1 source) using APA format when providing your answers.

Please note that by completing this assignment you are abiding by the following academic honesty statement:

I hereby attest that by submitting this assignment, that the work and writing are my own, that any direct quotations have been properly cited and that I have properly cited references where I have used someone else’s ideas.

Additional resources for completing Part 1:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2017). A framework for program evaluation. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/eval/framework/

Measure Evaluation: http://www.measureevaluation.org/

Questions

Answer the following questions about the program evaluation using an established framework for program evaluation.

1. Identify a framework that can be used for the program evaluation and its key features.

2. Who are the potential stakeholders for this program. Please list and indicate why each person, or representative of a group should be included.

3. What strategies will be used to engage the stakeholders with the program evaluation goals, share power and resolve conflicts?

4. Provide a description of the intervention that is being evaluated. What is it that the program is trying to accomplish? What need is the program serving? How does the program fit into the larger goals of the organization?

5. What types of evaluation questions would you ask? Is a formative or summative evaluation most appropriate, or would you use both? Explain your answer.

6. What are the intended results of the program? Specify the outcomes. What will the program need to do to be considered successful?

7. What criteria can be used to judge program performance? What standards of performance on the criteria must be reached for the program to be considered successful? You may use a table for this answer.

8. What evidence will indicate performance on the criteria relative to the standards?

9. What are the sources of the evidence or data for each of the criteria for the program evaluation?

10. What processes could be put in place to make the data collection for the program evaluation is easy to use, valid, and reliable? Reliability refers to the reproducibility of the data. Validity refers to whether the measure is truly measuring the concept, or outcome.

11. How can the program evaluation data be shared with stakeholders? Health care providers? Health information exchanges? Funding agency?

12. Summarize how the health informaticist can create value in the transformation of data to information to support goals of a program evaluation.

HINF 550 Week 8 Assignment – Part 1 Case Study

You are a health informaticist who is a member of a team for a city health department that is charged with developing an evaluation plan for its tobacco prevention and cessation program. The program includes a smoking quit line, chronic diseases program to reduce the burden of tobacco-related diseases and is planning to develop a program to reduce e-cigarette use among youth. The program also provides outreach to provide educational services about tobacco prevention and cessation to members of the community.

The city has a higher rate of smokers than the average for the state and also the national average. Recently, there has been an influx of Hispanic immigrants to the community, but many members of that community are hesitant to use healthcare services. The city is seeking state grant funds to support its work and needs to have a clearly developed plan for evaluation of the program.

Last year, the program was denied grant funds because the evaluation submitted for the use of the previous year’s grant funds was missing data and did not adequately justify the use of the funds. The agency wants to submit a grant application to cover the direct costs of the services and needs to develop a more comprehensive evaluation plan.