George Tremblay and James Fauth, core faculty in the AUNE Department of Clinical Psychology and co-directors of the campus Center for Behavioral Health Innovation are scheduled to present alongside AUNE faculty and alumna Megan Edwards, and student John Erdmann at Evaluation 2015, an annual conference hosted by the American Evaluation Association (AEA) to be held November 9-14 in Chicago, Illinois.
At Evaluation 2015, participants will have the opportunity to learn about exemplary evaluations, enabling evaluation environments, evaluation policies, evaluation theories and methods, and research on evaluation from a range of cultures and regions throughout the world. The AUNE presenters will host “Maximizing Practitioner Utility of Data Dashboards” and “Toward More Formative and Powerful Evaluation of Collective Impact in Community Health Improvement Contexts.”
Presentation details below:
Maximizing Practitioner Utility of Data Dashboards:
George Tremblay, James Fauth, John Erdmann, and Patrick Roberts
In the era of modern electronic records and visualization software, data dashboards are touted for their potential to support rapid feedback and more effective decision making.
We describe and illustrate principles that have helped us design well-used dashboards in the contexts of suicide prevention for psychiatric inpatients returning to their communities, and care coordination for severely emotionally disturbed youth and their families. We design for clinical utility first: how can the dashboard generate the information needed for case-level decision making, and also produce the documentation needed for the patient chart, with minimal effort from busy clinical staff? Second, in addition to depicting patient-level outcomes, we aggregate outcomes across patients to yield program-level outcomes. Finally, we look for ways to monitor fidelity to designed care pathways: how is the focal service being allocated across the patient population?
Toward More Formative and Powerful Evaluation of Collective Impact in Community Health Improvement Contexts:
James Fauth, Megan Edwards, and George Tremblay
Collective Impact (CI) is an increasingly popular and influential community health improvement model. Shared measurement, along with a common agenda, continuous communication, backbone support, and mutually reinforcing strategies, is considered a critical ingredient of effective CI. Beyond ongoing monitoring of distal community health “impact” indicators, guidance on the shared measurement of the more proximal elements of CI remains thin. The sole focus on distal impact indicators undermines stakeholder engagement and formative learning, which are so crucial in these kinds of long-term, ambitious, and complex undertakings. This paper contributes to the extant knowledge base by describing how to monitor the more proximal outcomes associated with each of the aforementioned elements of effective CI, in addition to distal impact indicators, thereby creating a more flexible, formative, comprehensive, and powerful form of CI evaluation. The application of this CI evaluation model will be described in the context of “Healthy Monadnock 2020,” a healthiest community initiative in southwest New Hampshire.
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AEA is a professional organization with a mission to improve evaluation practices and methods, promote evaluation as a profession, and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action.
