Measuring connections between providers and community resources for prevention: The AHRQ clinical-community relationships measures (CCRM) atlas

A promising approach to enhancing the delivery of certain preventive services is for primary care providers to coordinate, cooperate, and collaborate with external nonclinical organizations such as local health departments and community-based organizations that share an interest in improving health and preventing disease, and that can deliver these services. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has set a long-term goal of understanding the ways in which relationships between clinical practices and community organizations can be an effective and feasible way to enhance the delivery of specific clinical preventive services. The Clinical-Community Relationships Measures (CCRM) project advances AHRQ's goal through the development of a measurement conceptual framework which provides a structure for identifying, categorizing, and understanding the basic components of effective clinical-community relationships. The framework organizes measures within a series of measurement domains that can provide the basis for empirical assessments of the structure, process, and outcome of the relationship at the practice or community level. The CCRM project team also conducted a literature review to gather existing clinical-community relationship measures and aligned these measures within the conceptual framework. The measurement conceptual framework as well as existing measures are presented in AHRQ's Clinical-Community Relationships Measures Atlas. This presentation will share the theoretical framework used to develop the measurement framework, introduce the domains within the measurement framework, and describe the existing measures populating the Atlas.