Improving Health in the Community: A Role for Performance Monitoring

How do communities protect and improve the health of their populations? Health care is part of the answer but so are environmental protections, social and educational services, adequate nutrition, and a host of other activities.

With concern over funding constraints, making sure such activities are efficient and effective is becoming a high priority.

Improving Health in the Community explains how population-based performance monitoring programs can help communities point their efforts in the right direction.

Within a broad definition of community health, the committee addresses factors surrounding the implementation of performance monitoring and explores the "why" and "how to" of establishing mechanisms to monitor the performance of those who can influence community health. The book offers a policy framework, applies a multidimensional model of the determinants of health, and provides sets of prototype performance indicators for specific health issues.

Improving Health in the Community presents an attainable vision of a process that can achieve community-wide health benefits.

• Front Matter
• Executive Summary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Understanding Health and Its Determinants
• 3 Managing a Shared Responsibility for the Health of a Community
• 4 A Community Health Improvement Process
• 5 Measurement Tools for a Community Health Improvement Process
• 6 Conclusions and Recommendations
• A Prototype Performance Indicator Sets
• A.1 Breast and Cervical Cancers
• A.2 Depression
• A.3 Elder Health
• A.4 Environmental and Occupational Lead Poisoning
• A.5 Health Care Resource Allocation
• A.6 Infant Health
• A.7 Tobacco and Health
• A.8 Vaccine-Preventable Diseases
• A.9 Violence
• B Methodological Issues in Developing Community Health Profiles and Performance Indicator Sets Michael A. Stoto
• C Using Performance Monitoring to Improve Community Health: Exploring the Issues (Workshop Summary)
• D Using Performance Monitoring to Improve Community Health: Conceptual Framework and Community Experience (Workshop Summary)
• E Committee Biographies
• Acronyms
• Index