Results That Matter for Public Health
Partnerships among many organizations are essential to improving community health, but they create major challenges in aligning partners’ efforts to achieve desired results. We help public health leaders manage the complexity of collaborative initiatives, measure performance across organizations, and achieve a strategic focus on community health outcomes. The strategic management systems we help public health organizations develop can build upon tools they may already use, such as standards-based assessments, NACCHO's MAPP process, and quality improvement. For that reason, the Public Health Foundation selected our Community Balanced Scorecard (CBSC) and Effective Community Governance (ECG) methodologies as models to bring a new strategic community focus to public health improvement.
Our public health tools and methods include strategy maps to clarify goals and communicate roles and purpose among collaborators; approaches for improving community engagement; community compacts to strengthen partners’ accountability for results; and comprehensive Community Balanced Scorecards to manage collaborative strategies.
Project Highlights
- We are working with the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) and the Office of Civilian Volunteer Medical Reserve Corps of the Surgeon General's Office to develop a strategic road mapping methodology and train leaders of Medical Resrve Corps (MRCs) from communities across the country to use it. After testing this strategic planning approach with these community leaders, we will refine and document it for use by many more of the nation's 888 MRCs.
- We are partnered with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) to assist the Delaware Division of Public Health (DPH) in strategic planning and accreditation preparation using our balanced scorecard strategy mapping approach as the core tool. DPH adopted a "top level" map we provided for the division as a whole. And we helped DPH develop a strategy map to increase healthy lifestyles, with a focus on reducing African American obesity, as their first division-wide issue-specific strategy. We also provided tools for deveoping key measurement and accountability details of their strategy to provide the building blocks of a performance management system DPH is developing.
- Our local public health Community Balanced Scorecard (CBSC) projects have involved six communities in four states. We have helped community partnership teams develop strategy maps to reduce obesity, increase child wellness, eliminate preventable chronic disease, improve youth behavioral health outcomes, and increase access to care. They have been using their strategy maps to build community support for change and to obtain implementation commitments by partners. For example:
- In Osceola County, Florida, the Health Department and Community Vision, Inc., used their strategy map to obtain the commitment of the Health Leadership Council, which includes the heads of major public, nonprofit, and charitable organizations (including hospitals and the county government), to convene a Community Health Summit to address access to care.
- Strategy mapping in Wood County, Ohio, led to Bowling Green State University to train faculty and graduate assistants to recognize signs of potential mental health problems in students and refer them for screening and treatment before problems become severe. The strategy has also been used to start or increase suicide prevention programs in public schools and school districts in the county.
- In Montgomery County, Ohio, the Get Up Montgomery campaign for healthy lifestyles and obesity reduction has used both their strategy map and "Partner2Partner Handshakes," their adaptation of the Community Results Compact tool we introduced, to develop stong commitments with over 50 partners and counting.
- With our partner the KH consulting group, we developed balanced scorecards for Los Angeles County Public Health consistent with the department’s strategic plan, including scorecards for strategies that depend on numerous partnerships with community organizations to improve public health outcomes and reduce disparities.
- For the U.S. CDC's National Public Health Performance Standards Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Multistate Learning Collaborative, we partnered with the Public Health Foundation to provide strategic planning training based on our Community Balanced Scorecard methodology to local, state, and federal public health officials from across the country.
View Our Free Recorded Webinar
Community Balanced Scorecards for Collaborative Public Health Strategies
Additional Resources
- Briefing pape (DOC) “Community Balanced Scorecards for Strategic Public Health Improvement,” by Paul Epstein and Alina Simone.
- Three chapters by Results That Matter Team members in The Public Health Quality Improvement Handbook of the Public Health Foundation and American Society for Quality
Selected Clients
- Association of State and Territorial Health Officials
- Bergen County [New Jersey] Community Health Improvement Partnership
- Delaware Division of Public Health
- Los Angeles County Public Health
- National Association of County and City Health Officials
- New York City Health Department
- Public Health - Dayton & Montgomery County, Ohio
- Public Health Foundation
- Osceola County [Florida] Health Department
- Saint Clair County [Illinois] Health Department
- Summit County [Ohio] Health District
- Wood County [Ohio] Health Department