The fourth edition of the Healthy Brain Initiative Road Map for State and Local Public Health (Road Map), guides state and local health departments to combine population level data with program evaluation and data sharing to influence policy, systems and environmental change. The new actions in the Monitor, Evaluate and Utilize Data domain focus on the combined importance of data collection from multiple sources, program evaluation, and translation and sharing of data and results with communities, leadership and other key partners in meaningful ways.

A new feature of the fourth Road Map is an accompanying evaluation tool for use by state and local health departments. The tool offers suggested measures and metrics for each action of the Road Map, providing health departments a standard way to measure varying levels of action implementation. The measures were developed in partnership between the Alzheimer’s Association, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) to ensure comprehensiveness, ease of use, and alignment to other health department evaluation processes and to federal reporting requirements under state and local-based cooperative agreements. Further, these measures align to Healthy People 2030 objectives under the Dementias topic.

By embedding a unified evaluation plan into the actions and overarching framework, consistent and nationwide assessment will take place, demonstrating the collective impact of the Road Map on communities across the country.