Evaluation Capacity Building for Integrated Care Models in Practice

Abstract

Quality and timely evaluation is key in creating a sustainable integrated care; however, it requires resources, expertise, and capacity building. Evaluation capacity building (ECB) is the process of improving an organization’s capacity to conduct rapid cycle evaluations by building knowledge and skills within the organisation. The process involves behavioral changes and could enhance collective capability to generate evidence for informed decision-making. ECB can be a complex process and it could become even more complicated in the context of integrated care where several organizations are involved. However, ECB could lay the groundwork for a stronger collaboration and eventually lead to achieving goals such as improving population health, patient/caregiver and provider experience, value for money, and equity (quintuple aim).
 The workshop is built on the following three questions:
 1.What is the state of the art on evaluation of integrated care?
 
 The workshop will focus on presenting evaluation approaches and techniques such as developmental, ethnographic, and realist evaluations, as well as quantitative methods such as comparative effectiveness)
 
 2.What can be done internally to build local capacity? What are some main considerations?
 
 We present a case study from Toronto, Canada. In partnership with Health System Performance Network, East Toronto Health Partners (ETHP) have invested in building internal evaluation capacity since 2020 to support learning, knowledge transfer, and decision making for scale and spread of their new models of care. We will talk about how ETHP made decisions about what they would evaluate, what/ who was needed to do this, and how they decided that it was possible to achieve their goals.
 From a local capacity perspective, we will also focus on intervention-level evaluation (i.e. understanding the goals of the intervention, the activities and their links to goals, and the ‘countable’ ‘measurable’ aspects of implementation (processes), and data collection, analysis, and interpretation).
 
 3.What are some practical tools that can be used for internal capacity building?
 
 We will share some practical tools with the audience including logic model and evaluation plan templates that were developed by HSPN/ETHP.
 
 We propose a 120-minute workshop with the following structure: 
 1)Welcome (5 minutes)
 2)Theory burst: State of the art (30 minutes)
 3)Group discussion: Getting to know each other and report back (20 minutes)
 4)Break (10 minutes)
 5)Case study: East Toronto Health Partners Journey (20 minutes)
 6)Fireside chat: A facilitated discussion on building evaluation capacity (20 minutes)
 7)Evaluation toolkit presentation (10 minutes)
 8)Wrap up (5 minutes)
 We will engage the audience by sharing practical example and inviting them to relate what they have learnt to their evaluation needs. We will share an evaluation toolkit with the audience as a way to summarize the take home messages of the workshop.