Public health performance management systems organized as quality improvement cycles

While health departments have succeeded in applying Quality Improvement (QI) techniques to improve narrowly-defined processes, few, if any, have made systematic use of QI principles for overall performance management of the agency. And as agencies prepare for public health accreditation, many find they are weak in the requirement for a performance management system. This presentation will provide an overview of a performance management approach the presenter has been developing with the Public Health Foundation based on the “PDCA” Plan-Do-Check-Act QI cycle that can be used for a system to continually improve agency performance in the pursuit of improving population health. The approach ties together health assessment, planning, strategy, QI, and performance management in integrated cycles, enabling agencies to meet many accreditation requirements in one system as they improve their performance. At least two state health departments and several dozen local health departments will begin testing this approach in the winter and spring of 2013, which will enable presentation of early experiences from the field. These will include comparisons of how the approach has been applied to different public health programs, and comparisons of applications mainly focused internally on agency performance and those focused more externally on managing community health system performance by agencies using collaborative processes such as NACHO's MAPP or Community Balanced Scorecards.