Evaluators as change agents: Building program capacity, ownership and use of data

Three years ago five unique community-based childhood asthma interventions were privately funded in GA to reduce morbidity, facilitate effective healthcare and foster community and/or systems level changes. Our university-based evaluation team was funded to document effectiveness of these programs, determine and measure outcomes, facilitate cross-site understanding and identify policy change opportunities within and across the childhood asthma interventions. During the first two years our team worked collaboratively with the five very different programs to improve interventions, document program formative evaluation, improve cross-site measures (immediate, intermediate and long term) and collect data for continuous improvement. To complete these processes we functioned as evaluators and change agents, emphasizing quality of program, data, performance measures and capacity building. Throughout the first two years of funding we employed this quality improvement model to demonstrate how interventions can be linked to systems changes such as emergency room visit reductions if effective use of performance measures and data can be established. In our quality improvement approach, the team worked to link the specific program activities with the more distal outcomes to demonstrate cross site effectiveness while building capacity for program sustainability. This presentation will examine how the quality improvement model the team used to link the individual and systems change objectives to the distal outcomes provided effective summative data. We will review the impact of our role as change agents on the programs and on the cross site evaluation. In addition, we will share the lessons learned as we implemented this three year evaluation initiative.