Healthy People 2010 Final Review: Evaluation of progress towards targets

For three decades, Healthy People has provided a comprehensive set of national 10-year health promotion and disease prevention objectives aimed at improving the health of all Americans. It is grounded in the principle that establishing objectives and providing benchmarks to track and monitor progress over time can motivate, guide, and focus action. Healthy People 2010 (HP2010) continued in this tradition by identifying a wide range of public health priorities and specific, measurable objectives with targets to be reached by the end of the decade. An evaluation of progress toward the Healthy People 2010 target for each objective was conducted. Progress toward the targets was measured using the percentage of targeted change that was achieved or the progress quotient. The progress quotient expresses any change from the baseline relative to the initial difference between the baseline and the target. Confidence intervals for progress quotients were used to evaluate the statistical significance of changes from the baseline data to the most recent data point. The use of Kendall-Tau correlation was used to assess trends in estimates of objectives with five or more data points. Using these and other methodologies, the Healthy People 2010 Final Review identifies areas in which significant progress has been made toward target achievement, as well as areas in which challenges have hindered meeting targets.