Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Practice-Based Research Network in Public Health

The Foundation's initiative, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Practice-Based Research Network in Public Health, was designed to develop a practice-based research network for public health to help stakeholders understand how public health systems research can be used to improve public health performance and impact.This project supports the Minnesota Public Health PBRN as one of six participating networks in the Multi-Network Practice and Outcome Variation Examination Study (MPROVE), which uses the infrastructure of multiple PBRNs to investigate the causes and consequences of geographic variation in service delivery across diverse public health settings. Led by the Minnesota Department of Health, the project will collect community-level measures of public health service delivery in the domains of chronic disease prevention, communicable disease control, and environmental health protection in all 75 of Minnesota's local public health agency jurisdictions. The project will utilize and build upon an existing web-based reporting system operated by the state health department to collect annual financial, staffing, and performance data from local health departments, and will develop new measures of service delivery and quality to be collected through this system. Data from this project will be pooled with measures collected by the other five participating PBRNs in order to identify factors that influence geographic variation in public health service delivery and to detect service-outcome relationships that present opportunities for health improvement. Additionally, the project will conduct local analyses of public health service delivery patterns in Minnesota by linking service delivery measures with existing state health department data sources on staffing and program performance. Findings will be disseminated through a workshop, a policy brief and journal article, and a decision support tool developed for state and national public health audiences.

Grant Details

Amount Awarded $49,274.00

Awarded on: 3/30/2012

Time frame: 4/15/2012 - 10/14/2013

Grant Number: 69956