Formulating an evaluation and data-collection plan for the Baltimore Cardiovascular Health Disparities Initiative

The Baltimore City Health Department is proposing an Initiative to address cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is the city's leading cause of death, the leading cause of a 6-year gap in life expectancy between the City and the state of Maryland, and the top reason for a 20-year range in life expectancy among neighborhoods within the city itself. The Initiative, to be launched July 2009, aims to bring successful community-based public health programs to scale citywide, translating research into practice and distributing resources to communities in need.

The Cardiovascular Health Disparities Initiative includes five evidence-based components, each intended for populations that bear unequal burdens of cardiovascular disease: (1) health education through faith institutions – for women over 40, (2) disease management by community health workers – for underserved patients with known disease, (3) blood pressure screening and referral in barbershops – for at-risk men, particularly African American men, (4) Salt Task Force, (5) tobacco control.

Each component requires careful data-collection and evaluation to assess overall program success and target improvement efforts. This paper will focus on evaluation of the first three components. Challenges include those of translating research into practice, namely having limited resources to increase the scale of interventions and subsequent data-collection. Additional considerations include choosing indicators to compare with State and national data and collaborating with community-based organizations to determine how evaluation tasks fall within their organizational capacity. This evaluation scheme seeks to make the Initiative sustainable and serve as an example for other large community-based programs aimed at reducing disparities.