Policy and environmental approaches to obesity prevention: Lessons from the evaluation of Kaiser Permanente's Community Health Initiative

The Kaiser Permanente (KP) Community Health Initiative (CHI) is a program-wide strategy for improving the health of communities served by KP. The thematic focus is on "Healthy Eating, Active Living" (HEAL) - promoting improvements in nutrition and physical activity and reductions in overweight/obesity. The CHI intervention approach is to use environmental and policy changes to promote population-level improvements in levels of physical activity and proportions of the population eating a healthy diet. Thirty communities in five KP regions are currently implementing CHI. A comprehensive, cross-site evaluation is being conducted covering the five years of CHI implementation (2006-2011). Evaluation methods include baseline and follow-up population-level surveys of youth and adults, and documentation of community programmatic and environmental changes taking place as a result of CHI. This presentation will provide an overview of the design for the CHI cross-site evaluation, describe policy and environmental changes taking place in the CHI communities, and present baseline population-level findings and evaluation lessons learned to date.