(143) Building a Systematic Evaluation Strategy for Measuring the Impact of Health Information Outreach

Background: Our organization is a national leader in health information development, dissemination, and outreach. It also conducts health information outreach and dissemination efforts through an affiliated professional network that reaches multiple communities. Recent organizational restructuring resulted in centralization of the organization’s outreach, training and engagement activities in a newly-created office. The office is building a comprehensive evaluation strategy for measuring the impact of health information outreach activities. The objective is to create a set of customizable tools that measure different outcome variables targeted by health information outreach activities and a strategy for matching outreach activities with the appropriate tools.

Description: Using a published, research-based model of the impact of health information outreach, developed by the first author, we created a list of outcome variables potentially affected by health information outreach. The list was validated through discussions with our network evaluators. Examples of variables include awareness of health information resources, health information evaluation skills, and health information behaviors. We then developed a pilot tool for measuring awareness of health information resources, programs, and organizations (three of the variables on the list). Next, we adapted this measure to evaluating the impact of health information exhibits and pilot-tested it at two major national conferences. Other, ongoing, program activities include comprehensive environmental scan of published reports of health information outreach, with the extraction of evaluation instruments, development of measures for other variables, and pilot-testing them with one of our national programs.

Conclusion: When completed, this program will produce standardized quantitative data on various aspects of impact of our health information outreach activities, such as exhibits, workshops, health fairs, webinars and more. This will allow us to obtain a comprehensive picture of how our efforts promote health information awareness, self-efficacy, health information seeking and evaluation skills, health information behaviors, and more in the populations with which we work. This will help our organization make strategic decisions concerning its outreach efforts. The instruments, easily customizable to targeted activities, and accompanying guidelines will be available free of charge to others wishing to use them.