Evaluation

The vision of the Population Health Initiative is to create a world where all people can live healthier and more fulfilling lives. Progress needs to be consistent and steady if we are to achieve this vision, meaning we must be able to evaluate whether we are successfully advancing the initiative’s work.

To support this evaluation, we wish to measure progress of the initiative as a whole, and we also want to track how initiative-funded projects are impacting major population health challenges. As a result, our evaluation plan consists of two separate components:

1. The first component tracks the impact that is realized from direct investments by the initiative.
2. The second component provides a framework, or overlay, of areas that we consider to be important within any project we fund. The framework is not intended to dictate specific measures of how a funded project team should evaluate their work, but rather to offer guidance to investigators who lead individual projects. This delegation creates flexibility that allows for both innovation and project-specific variations, while still ensuring that measures of success are consistently tracked across projects.

Evaluating the Population Health Initiative

The initiative-level approach to evaluation, which consists of a combination of metrics intended for either external reporting or internal process improvement, follows.

Evaluation goals (institutional-level metrics): To rigorously track the impact that results from the initiative’s investments (e.g., funding, resources, time). To learn which strategies work best in achieving initiative goals, and to iteratively refine and improve the approaches to this work.

1. Total projects funded and overall investment (i.e., central, philanthropic, and departmental funds) in pilot research grants	2. Return on investment for pilot research grants (i.e., seed funding led to X% ROI via follow-on funding, or to patents or other impacts)
3. Number of faculty engaged through partnership work, grants, courses, and other initiative activities and programs	4. New faculty collaborations initiated through initiative-related activities
5. Number of students engaged, and the impact of that engagement, through courses, programs, research projects, fellowships community-based work, and other programs	6. Changes to institutional culture inspired by the initiative (e.g., new infrastructure to support interdisciplinary collaboration, increase in non-traditional partnerships and projects, and so forth)
7. Number, and corresponding impact, of community partnerships supported by initiative activities	8. Overall impact of the initiative toward the UW realizing its vision for population health (e.g., positioning in specific fields, contributions to science, media mentions and website visits, and so forth)

Evaluating initiative-funded projects

The initiative also offers a framework to inform the development of project-specific metrics by the UW investigators who lead initiative-funded projects.

This framework is intended to offer an overlay that highlights areas we believe are important within any population health challenge an investigative team will take on. Actual metrics will be developed and tracked by investigators at the individual project level.

Interdisciplinary collaboration:

• Is there input and/or collaboration from all possible disciplines that can make an impact on solving the problem?
• Does the project follow known best practices for functioning as an effective team?

Community engagement:

• Is there a significant degree of community and partner involvement and input to project design?
• Is the engagement reciprocal and intentional?
• Will the project have a positive impact on the community and the UW?
• Does the project team demonstrate cultural humility?

Application in real-world settings:

• Does the intervention bring about measurable, positive change?
• Is the intervention sustainable?
• Is the intervention adopted by the community it is intended to benefit?
• Is there potential to scale or adapt the intervention to other settings?