High performance public health: assessing agencies' strategic management capabilities.

Limited knowledge about state health agencies' strategic management capabilities constrains their capacity to improve public health. The current study addresses this gap through two objectives: 1) To assess agencies' strategic management capabilities, conceptualized through a learning framework and 2) To portray both those capabilities and where the agencies have progressed along a developmental pathway of strategic management ability. Forty-one state health agencies' documents from 1995-2000 were content analyzed.