Preface

RAND Health is working under contract with the Public Health Information Group of the Center for Community Health in the New York State Department of Health, with financial support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Assessment Initiative, to develop a web-based tool to determine and enhance the usefulness of Community Health Assessments (CHA) in New York State. The product of this work will be a web-based tool that allows end users of CHA products to assess their usefulness. Feedback from this tool will aid CHA developers in local health departments in identifying strengths and weaknesses of their CHA process and products, and will include suggested links to information that would enable them to improve CHA usefulness.

As a first step in this process, we conducted a review of studies and publications assessing CHAs to identify factors and criteria that may characterize CHA processes and products, based on the reported experience of previous users. Due to the dearth of existing information describing CHAs, there were no existing criteria for us to apply to crafting judgments regarding "usefulness," of these CHAs but we hoped that learning about characteristics of existing CHAs would provide us with content upon which to build the web-based tool. This paper describes our findings.

Based on this paper, we created a list of 85 criteria and 2 open-ended questions. After feedback from experts and practitioners in five New York counties and on a national technical advisory panel, and presentations at the CDC's Assessment Initiative conference in 2004, we reduced the list to 32 close-ended criteria in three categories (CHA content, format, and impact) plus 3 open-ended questions. Following that, we conducted e-mail survey of CHA users in the same five New York counties, and based on that input reduced the number of close-ended criteria to 21. These criteria were then used on a trial basis to evaluate the usefulness of five New York county CHAs, and a report is being developed to feed the provide results back to CHA developers in a way that helps them identify strengths and weaknesses of their CHAs and provides suggested links to information that would enable them to improve CHA usefulness. In the final phase of the project, this tool will be refined, rolled out in New York and elsewhere, and evaluated.

We are grateful for comments on earlier drafts from Susan Straus of RAND and Priti Irani and Cate Bohn of the New York State Department of Health. We have also benefited from presentations of an earlier draft of this material at the national meeting of the CDC Assessment Initiative in Atlanta in September 2004 and as a webcast by the Assessment Initiative Technical Advisory Group in November 2004.