Estimating the reach of community interventions in the CDC's Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) and Community Transformation (CTG) programs

The number of potential beneficiaries of an intervention is a critical outcome measure for evaluations of community health initiatives. Reach data provide information on the number of unique individuals exposed to a program's activities. However, a gold standard methodology for measuring reach across policy, systems, and environmental interventions has not been established. We utilized a novel methodology for capturing reach in 100 communities funded by two large CDC investments in community health – the Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) and Community Transformation Grant (CTG) programs.

Both programs focus on high-impact, broad-reaching interventions. For example, CPPW will reach over 55 million people - nearly 1 in 5 Americans. To calculate direct and indirect reach, communities estimated population counts using census, school district, and other publicly available data. We also calculated the number of settings (e.g., hospitals, schools) in which those interventions take place. Our approach for CTG also identifies health disparate subpopulations and the percent of possible settings and population per intervention.

These data are stored in a relational database that allows for queries on the reach of any intervention, in any setting, at any point in time. For example, our system shows that over 10 million Americans in 16 CPPW communities have access to healthier foods and beverages that are priced less than their less healthy counterparts. This framework can be applied to similar community-based initiatives to guide mid-course corrections to implementation plans, assist in calculating the early outcomes of the interventions, and inform future investments in community health.