Saving Lives and Saving Money: The Role of North Carolina Health Departments in Medicaid Managed Care.

A new Medicaid system is emerging in North Carolina in which accountable care organizations will aim to improve both the quality and value of health care. We explore how local health departments can apply their expertise in population health to help achieve these goals.

Adoption of Evidence-Based Interventions in Local Health Departments: "1-2-3 Pap NC".

Descriptions of barriers and facilitators to adoption of evidence-based interventions in local health departments (LHDs) are limited. This study was conducted by the North Carolina Public Health Practice-Based Research Network to identify factors associated with adoption of an evidence-based human papillomavirus video intervention, "1-2-3 Pap NC," in North Carolina LHDs. A sequential mixed-method study design was used.

Designing for dissemination: lessons in message design from "1-2-3 pap".

Despite a large number of evidence-based health communication interventions tested in private, public, and community health settings, there is a dearth of research on successful secondary dissemination of these interventions to other audiences. This article presents the case study of "1-2-3 Pap," a health communication intervention to improve human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination uptake and Pap testing outcomes in Eastern Kentucky, and explores strategies used to disseminate this intervention to other populations in Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia. Through this dissemination project, we identified several health communication intervention design considerations that facilitated our successful dissemination to these other audiences; these intervention design considerations include (a) developing strategies for reaching other potential audiences, (b) identifying intervention message adaptations that might be needed, and (c) determining the most appropriate means or channels by which to reach these potential future audiences.

Local health department priority setting: an exploratory study.

Priority setting is an integral part of the community health assessment process since it helps direct the allocation of limited public health resources among competing needs. There is a recognized need for a systematic mechanism to prioritize community health issues in objective, data-driven, quantifiable measures. This exploratory study examined the extent to which data-driven objective criteria were considered important to public health officials in North Carolina and, specifically, the extent to which they chose between objective and subjective criteria in establishing public health priorities.

NC CATCH: Advancing Public Health Analytics.

The North Carolina Comprehensive Assessment for Tracking Community Health (NC CATCH) is a Web-based analytical system deployed to local public health units and their community partners. The system has the following characteristics: flexible, powerful online analytic processing (OLAP) interface; multiple sources of multidimensional, event-level data fully conformed to common definitions in a data warehouse structure; enabled utilization of available decision support software tools; analytic capabilities distributed and optimized locally with centralized technical infrastructure; two levels of access differentiated by the user (anonymous versus registered) and by the analytical flexibility (Community Profile versus Design Phase); and, an emphasis on user training and feedback. The ability of local public health units to engage in outcomes-based performance measurement will be influenced by continuing access to event-level data, developments in evidence-based practice for improving population health, and the application of information technology-based analytic tools and methods.