Community Health Workers in Chicago's Health Care Centers: Roles, Program Structure, and Evaluation

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are increasingly being recognized as part of health care delivery teams, yet there are still many questions as to their roles and responsibilities and impact on improvements in quality of care and patient outcomes. Several studies have evaluated the effectiveness of CHW partnerships with nurses, doctors, and other health care professionals. However, there remains limited knowledge on the breadth of clinical CHW models, on the whole, and how to best structure and evaluate CHW programs in health care settings. The purpose of this study is to critically examine the impact of CHWs in health care settings on the Westside of Chicago, an area poor in medical resources, but rich in community strength. Twenty-six health care centers are located on the Westside of Chicago with 62% employing CHWs. Surveys were collected from both CHWs themselves and program administrators with questions focusing on CHW characteristics, association with standard CHW definitions, job duties, training, supervision, funding, and program evaluation. Process and outcome measures were assessed for each program to determine how health care centers evaluate the impact of CHWs, and findings are being used to inform the development of standard CHW evaluation measures, a task that has been called for by several prominent researchers in the CHW field. This presentation will discuss survey findings, comparisons between CHW and administrator surveys and next steps in the development of standardized CHW metrics and quality measures