Developing Health Care Evaluation Frameworks: Learnings from a Comprehensive Literature Review

Abstract

Background: Evidence suggests that shifting from acute, hospital- based health care delivery to preventative, community-based health care (CBHC) makes care more cost-effective, efficient, and equitable. As such, the Government of Alberta, Canada, has recently committed to promoting health and providing health care services to individuals in their own communities. In order to measure their progress, the Alberta’s Ministry of Health approached our research team to create an evidence-based evaluation framework to monitor progress on this initiative. To inform our framework development approach, our team undertook a comprehensive literature review. Methods: We comprehensively reviewed peer-reviewed and grey literature to identify evaluation frameworks and indicators applicable to CBHC programs. Searches were conducted in six databases in June 2018. The search was limited to articles published between 2013 and 2018. The reviewers identified additional studies by scanning reference lists of studies found through the database search, hand-searching grey literature, and obtaining recommendations from expert colleagues in the field. Data were extracted and analyzed by two authors. Results: Ten key themes arose from the article data analysis. Using the themes, team members generated a set of ten overarching recommendations for creating health care evaluation frameworks. Conclusion: This research describes the results of examining the community-based health care evaluation literature and provides ten recommendations for creating new health care evaluation frameworks.