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The Office of Minority Health (OMH) utilizes a Performance Improvement and Management System (PIMS) to help OMH managers, staff, grantees, partners, and other stakeholders improve the quality of planning, implementation and evaluation of programs funded by OMH. The PIMS provides OMH with strategic and systematic approaches to planning, conducting and evaluating programs and projects, to help better identify the results of efforts to eliminate racial and ethnic minority health and health care disparities and to advance health equity.
The Strategic Framework presents a vision, a rationale, and a "systems approach," for OMH and its partners to address racial and ethnic minority health problems.
Key Take-Away Messages Based on the approach of The Strategic Framework, there are 10 key messages that can be used to summarize OMH's systematic approach to decreasing health disparities.
Performance measures or indicators for OMH-funded grant programs and other programmatic efforts will be different from those needed by other OMH partners and stakeholders, depending upon the kinds of outcomes or impacts to be achieved, at what levels of the Framework (individual, environment/ community, and/or systems) interventions are aimed, and whether adequate and tested measures actually exist for the kinds of results expected.
OMH considers the following data sets to be key resources for identifying evidence-based strategies and performance measures that can be used by organizations working on clinical- and community-based prevention and health care quality improvement in general populations as well as in racial/ethnic minority communities:
The Health Indicators Warehouse is a major new and evolving resource for identifying and selecting performance measures or indicators, launched by HHS in early 2011 as part of the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI), a public-private effort to increase understanding by program planners, researchers, policymakers, and others of the health status and health care performance of their communities, inform action to improve performance and, ultimately, improve community-level health outcomes. The objective of the HIW is to provide a single, user-friendly, web-based resource through which a vast collection of standardized, publicly available health indicators from a wide array of HHS data sources can be identified, obtained, and applied to program and policy decision-making.
The HIW currently contains nearly 1200 health indicators derived from over 170 different data sources, including those used to track measures for Healthy People 2020. As new and better data on health, health care, and determinants of health performance at the national, state, regional, and county levels, as well as by age, gender, race/ethnicity, income, and other variables are available, the HIW will expand accordingly. The site provides users with the tools to pull the data as well as to manipulate, display, and share those data. For more information about the Community Health Data Initiative and the Health Indicators Warehouse, visit http://healthindicators.gov.
The Performance Data System (PDS) is OMH's principal means for systematically collecting, aggregating and reporting performance data about its funded programmatic efforts. It houses data for monitoring, analysis and reporting on OMH's and grant recipients' effectiveness. This system is intended for use by grantees and OMH program officials. You must have a login and password to access the PDS.
How to Hire an Evaluator [PDF | 145KB]
Evaluation Planning Guidelines [PDF | 584KB] For use by applicants for OMH grants and cooperative agreements.
Evaluation Protocol [PDF | 3.2MB] Not specific to OMH grant applicants, but useful as a guide to other OMH-funded partners, community groups, state agencies, and other stakeholders for systematic program planning, performance measurement, data collection, and evaluation.
View OMH-funded program evaluations and policy-relevant studies here or the HHS Evaluation Database.
The systematic use of the Strategic Framework, performance measurement and evaluation tools, and the other resources on this website is intended to improve the ability of OMH, its grantees, and others to identify those strategies and practices that "work" in achieving desired or intended program results.
