Abstract
Background: Community-based organizations (CBOs) play an important role delivering disease prevention and health promotion activities to address community health needs and improve the health of individuals living in their communities. While CBOs play this important role, evaluation of the services they deliver is hampered by limited infrastructure to systematically collect data from these organizations. To address this gap, we report on a case study of the development of the Ohio Equity Institute (OEI) Data Portal. The OEI is a statewide initiative that supports 65 CBOs across Ohio to deliver 3 evidence-based interventions (ie, CenteringPregnancy, Community Health Workers, and Home Visiting) to address infant mortality in underserved populations. Methods: Employing principles of community-engaged stakeholder research and user-centered design, we conducted Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles, including semistructured interviews with 43 key informants, to improve the development, implementation, and use of the OEI Data Portal. Results: This process identified both technical and implementation challenges, and offered opportunities to make improvements to the data collection system itself as well as to the integration of this system with CBO workflows. These improvements yielded significant gains in terms of the quantity and quality of data submission, ultimately contributing to ongoing outcome evaluation efforts. Conclusion: Our findings provide important insight into the challenges experienced by CBOs when participating in a statewide CBO data evaluation infrastructure development and implementation. As Ohio and other states push to expand collaborations between CBOs and health care organizations, leaders should leverage existing data collection to facilitate a more comprehensive and effective process.
Highlights
Community-based organizations (CBOs) play an important role delivering disease prevention and health promotion activities to address community health needs.[1,2,3] Community-based organizations, which are defined as public or nonprofit organizations that represent their communities and provide health and educational services,[3] facilitate state and national population health initiatives.[4,5,6] as of 2017, several state Medicaid programs incentivize health care systems to work with CBOs to address social determinants of health.[7]
Our findings provide important insight into the challenges experienced by CBOs when participating in a statewide CBO data evaluation infrastructure development and implementation
In 2018, Ohio Equity Institute (OEI) began to provide funding to 65 CBOs to deliver 3 evidence-based interventions focused on reducing the disparity in infant mortality: CenteringPregnancy group prenatal classes; Home Visiting; or Community Health Workers (CHWs).[23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32]
Summary
Community-based organizations (CBOs) play an important role delivering disease prevention and health promotion activities to address community health needs.[1,2,3] Community-based organizations, which are defined as public or nonprofit organizations that represent their communities and provide health and educational services,[3] facilitate state and national population health initiatives.[4,5,6] as of 2017, several state Medicaid programs incentivize health care systems to work with CBOs to address social determinants of health.[7] The relationship between CBOs and health care providers is further encouraged by funding programs, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health.[8] To participate in these efforts and support partnerships with health care organizations, it is important for CBOs to build evaluation capabilities both to guide their own efforts as well as to demonstrate to funders and other stakeholders that they are effectively implementing evidence-based interventions.[9] Research suggests that building evaluation capacity, or the ability to perform evaluations, requires CBOs and their staff to buy into the importance of evaluation, commit sufficient resources to collect data, and collaborate with external researchers to develop sustainable evaluation methods.[10,11,12,13]. These interventions were focused on improving the health of pregnant women, infants, and their families within the Ohio counties disproportionately impacted by the disparity in infant mortality
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