Evaluation of Cardiovascular Disease Initiatives: A University and State Health Department Partnership

Issues:  The Mississippi Delta Health Collaborative (MDHC) was established by the Mississippi Department of Health (MSDH), with funding from CDC, to help lower the risk of heart disease and stroke through education, new policy, and environmental and system changes in the 18-county Delta region.  The Collaborative employs clinical, community-based and faith-based programs that focus on one or more goals related to aspirin, A1C/blood glucose, blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking. 

Description:  In the fourth year of a 5-year project, researchers from Mississippi State University were hired as the external evaluators of MDHC to work with the MDHC Leadership Team, Program Managers, MSDH Internal Evaluation Team, and other Collaborative stakeholders assess progress towards achieving performance goals and measuring program outcomes. Our evaluation consists of a pre- and post-test design, with no comparison groups. We describe baseline and follow-up data and the process of evaluating an initiative after an intervention has already been developed.

Lessons Learned:  This session will discuss strategies for maneuvering challenges related to various aspects of conducting program evaluation for a multi-intervention collaborative. We will discuss challenges related to: leveraging existing data sources and new data collection tools to measure program impact; the ongoing process used to adjust both programmatic and evaluation activities; and aligning academic and public health practitioner objectives to disseminate evaluation findings.

Recommendations: Developing effective partnerships between academic evaluators and public health practitioners can be challenging; however, cooperative partnerships with state health departments and communities can be conducive to conducting program evaluation in rural resource-limited areas.