Developing Process Measures Aligned with the Public Health Quality Aims

In 2008, the Department of Health and Human Services developed nine aims to for quality improvement in public health to guide practitioners in assessing and improving the quality of public health programs and policies. In a recent report outlining an approach for developing quality measures for population health, the Institute of Medicine stated that these aims could be use to evaluate the resources and capacities of public health systems to improve health conditions and produce healthy outcomes. The resources and capacities of any system are demonstrated in the design and operation of processes through which outputs get delivered. Therefore, to understand how the nine aims can be useful to practitioners in improving public health quality, key public health processes must be identified and measures must be developed that assess the performance of these processes for each relevant aim. In this presentation, we extend IOM's work by showing examples of process measures around the nine aims for selected public health programs aligned with the Leading Health Indicators, and describing how these measures can be used to improve the quality of processes through which priority population health services are delivered and managed.