Improving Outcome Accountability of Block Grants: Lessons Learned From the Preventive Health and Health Services Block Grant Evaluation.

The flexibility federal block grants provide recipients poses challenges for evaluation. These challenges include aggregating data on wide-ranging activities grant recipients implement and the outcomes they achieve. In 2014, we began designing an evaluation to address the challenges of assessing outcomes and to improve outcome accountability for the Preventive Health and Health Services Block Grant.

The Hepatitis Testing and Linkage-to-Care Data Review Process: An Approach to Ensuring the Quality of Program Data.

Objective: CDC's 2012 Hepatitis Testing and Linkage to Care (HepTLC) initiative was a nationally coordinated effort to conduct hepatitis B and hepatitis C screening, posttest counseling, and linkage to care at 34 U.S. sites.

Conceptualizing and measuring community preparedness within public health preparedness and response: complexities and lessons learned.

Since 2001, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Emergency Preparedness cooperative agreement has supported state, territorial, and local public health departments in preparing for and responding to public health emergencies. This conceptual article describes complexities identified and lessons learned in developing community preparedness performance measures for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's public health preparedness program. Challenges arose in (a) defining community; (b) measuring meaningful community engagement; and (c) determining a strategy for collecting, aggregating, and analyzing data from diverse state, territorial, and local health departments.