Lessons Learned From Measuring Return on Investment in Public Health Quality Improvement Initiatives.

Context: The Center for Public Health Quality and its partner, North Carolina State University Industrial Extension Service, used 2 existing, yet similar quality improvement (QI) programs to provide technical assistance to conduct return on investment (ROI) and economic impact (EI) analyses so that they could estimate their QI projects' financial impacts.

Objectives: The objectives of this article are to describe the approach and ongoing learning from applying ROI and EI analyses to public health QI projects and analyze the results in order to illustrate ROI potential in public health.

Design: We used a before-after study design for all ROI and EI analyses, spanning a 3-year time period.