Leveraging an information management system to address the evaluation and management challenges of a state tobacco control program

The Patient and Affordable Care Act is anticipated to provide $15 billion in funding for community transformation grants for the purpose of helping communities to reduce health disparities and chronic diseases by promoting healthy living and tackling underlying social and economic causes of poor health. It is evident that these Prevention Funds are the subject of much scrutiny and are vulnerable to redirection. In its two decades of existence, the California Tobacco Control Program (CTCP) experienced similar media scrutiny, interference, and efforts to redirect prevention funding resulting in extraordinary pressure to demonstrate that the funds were used appropriately and that meaningful health outcomes resulted from CTCP efforts. CTCP's statewide and community interventions component posed considerable management and evaluation challenges including a high need for accountability and transparency, variability in local agency capacity, and the sheer volume and diversity of local interventions. This presentation discusses California's successful nine year experience using the Online Tobacco Information System (OTIS) to address these challenges. This information system has implications for federal and state public health efforts funding large numbers of community projects. This presentation will provide information about system design features that enhanced program management such as automated document tracking, e-mail alerts, dash boards, aggregated reports, and search functions. It will discuss features that helped: level the “playing field” among diverse agencies applying for funding, improve the quality of intervention and evaluation plans, and reduce submission errors. Besides program management, information systems like OTIS provide enormous potential to evaluate the effectiveness of specific policy, compliance, or educational outreach interventions. Examples of how California has linked information from OTIS regarding the type, quantity and intensity of tobacco control interventions, project capacity, and performance measures with intermediate community outcomes illustrates the potential capacity for using information systems to evaluate statewide or national effectiveness of community-based interventions.