The Office of Minority Health (OMH), of the Department of Health and Human Services, is funding a major effort to develop a Uniform Data Set (UDS) across all its grant and cooperative agreement programs that can be used for program performance measures, for purposes of evaluation and program improvement, and as a means of identifying best practices. Most OMH grantees are community-based organizations and community health programs serving minority populations with a wide spectrum of prevention, health promotion, and access to care services, towards the goal of eliminating disparities in health that exist for minority populations. The data set resulting from this effort will thus have important methodological implications in terms of measuring the impact of community-based programs towards this goal, as well as generally assessing the impact of such programs.
The process of developing the OMH Uniform Data Set has included: 1) a review of relevant Federal agency and private UDS efforts, as well as interviews, focus groups, and site visits with a sample of OMH grantees -- to determine the best possible configuration, format and content of a data set usable across all OMH programs; 2) pilot testing of a prototype Uniform Data Set; and 3) based on the pilot test results, development of a final UDS. This paper will discuss the results of the development process thus far, and the proposed UDS resulting from that process, as well as the general question as to what kinds of data can adequately reflect what community-based health projects accomplish.
Learning Objectives: Participants will: 1) Learn about Office of Minority Health (Department of Health and Human Services)efforts to eliminate health disparities for minority populations. 2) Learn about the issues involved in collecting uniform data/performance measures from Office of Minority Health programs, most of which are community-based efforts
Keywords: Evaluation, Minority Health
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.