Community Health Program Monitoring and Evaluation through the Internet

The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the implementation and the evaluation of the Healthy Heart Program (HHP) for New York State which is funded by CDC through the Cardiovascular Health Grant. The HHP supports proposals from community level organizations and coalitions to increase heart healthy programs through environmental or policy changes. Funded interventions are then monitored by the HHP. Currently there are 17 community contractors working on 70 different projects, located across New York State. These community based interventions range from the creation of trails or walking routes to the changing of school food policies and practices. In order to monitor program progress for this diverse group of contractors, Healthy Heart Program contracted with the Kresge Center for Nursing Research at Binghamton University to create an innovative, web-based reporting and evaluation system that is broad enough to accommodate such a diverse set of interventions, yet specific enough to provide valuable progress reports. The end product enables users across New York State to collect and report standardized data, retrieve information, and generate a variety of reports. Program managers in the state capital Albany can monitor individual projects' progress on a regular basis and generate statewide or project specific reports. This initiative has already proven to be user friendly, cost effective, fast, and accurate. After a brief introduction to the program and its implementation, this presentation will focus on the evaluation process with specific examples of how this process may be utilized by other similar community based programs.