218904 Evaluating community health outcomes with electronic medical record data

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Sophia Newcomer, MPH , Institute for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, Denver, CO
Allen Cheadle, PhD , Group Health Research Institute, Center for Community Health and Evaluation, Seattle, WA
Kaiser Permanente's (KP) Community Health Initiative (CHI) program facilitates and funds community-based interventions to increase health eating and active living (HEAL). CHI interventions are developed and implemented at the local community level, with a focus on underserved populations. A challenge of the KP CHI program is measuring the physiologic outcomes of HEAL interventions at the community-level. KP electronic medical record (EMR) data offer one potential way of tracking health outcomes in CHI communities. For this study, we used Census data to match eight CHI-participating communities in California and Colorado with demographically-similar communities within the same counties not participating in CHI. EMR data were used to track key health indictors (i.e., average body mass index (BMI) and chronic conditions) for CHI and comparison communities over three consecutive years. While short-term changes in physiologic indicators are not expected, we hypothesize that long-term reductions in BMI and chronic conditions in the CHI communities will be greater than those seen in the comparison communities. The usefulness of the EMR data is greatest when KP market penetration is high in the defined geographic areas and when KP members are representative of the population at large (including those who are uninsured) in terms of their HEAL behaviors and health outcomes. Linking EMR data with communities provides a low-cost, efficient method of establishing long-term surveillance of community health initiative outcomes.

Learning Areas:
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
Describe the challenges of measuring physiologic, objective outcomes in the evaluation of community health initiatives Learn an approach to tracking community-level health outcomes using electronic medical record data

Keywords: Community Health Programs, Evaluation

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I work on the evaluation team for Kaiser Permanente Colorado's Community Health Initiative program, and I collected and analyzed the data for the Colorado communities in this study.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.