Focus Areas

Health is much broader than "health care." CCHE takes a holistic approach to health improvement. We work closely with communities, public health departments, policymakers and funders on initiatives to reduce health disparities and improve community health. Whether it is a community needs assessment, an evaluation of a small community garden, or partnering with a multi-sector coalition, we:  

• Leverage our understanding of social, economic, and environmental factors affecting health to address the root causes.
• Ground our work in the local context, listening closely to community stakeholders to understand the relevant systems and infrastructure
• Develop practical measures and frameworks to understand progress, including providing real-time feedback. For example, CCHE's Dose Toolkit allows us to measure the effects of different strategies on a common goal and then use this information to strengthen the overall impact 

CCHE brings decades of experience evaluating clinical care initiatives, working across settings ranging from large health systems to individual safety net clinics. Our practical, utilization-focused approach promotes learning, elevates promising practices, and measures outcomes while minimizing the burden on healthcare providers and staff. Our clinical care work includes: 

• Effective technical assistance and coaching to help healthcare organizations use data to drive decision-making and quality improvement
• Expertise in best practices for population health management, clinic-community linkages, behavioral health-primary care integration, and team-based care
• Close partnerships with funders, program and clinical staff to ensure that findings are actionable in real time
• Ability to understand the effectiveness of emerging approaches and co-develop new tools to measure progress. For example, our new capacity development tool supports organizations as they grow capacity around integrating trauma- and resilience-informed care into primary care settings.

At CCHE, our evaluations are designed to inform and support improving health for all people and all communities. This focus is especially apparent in our work partnering with initiatives that explicitly address structural inequities and aim to reduce disparities in health outcomes, so that all people can be healthy and thrive. Our work includes:

• Articulating how an investment is expected to improve health outcomes and address long-standing gaps in access, opportunity, or experience

• Understanding the broader social, historical, and community context that shapes current conditions, challenges, and opportunities

• Ensuring a wide range of perspectives inform evaluation planning, data collection, analysis, and reporting, including those of communities most affected by the investment

• Encouraging the ongoing use of data to understand differences in health access, opportunities, and outcomes and to inform action over time

Promoting ongoing learning is at the heart of our evaluation work. It's probably not surprising that evaluating efforts to build capacity and foster collective learning is an area where we shine. Whether these activities are elements of broader initiatives or stand-alone initiatives, we:

• Provide real-time feedback for funders and organizations seeking to strengthen their capacity, competencies and skills.
• Serve as strategic partners for learning collaboratives from design through evaluation. We use both standardized and tailored tools to assess and improve collaborative performance.
• Provide evaluation technical assistance and coaching to support organizations in doing their own evaluations. We bring a wealth of knowledge about strategically establishing appropriate infrastructure, practices, and resources to sustain growth.

One of the most powerful tools for change is the ability to impact the systems and policies that define entire communities. However, evaluating the impact of broad, complex initiatives can be challenging because these initiatives have content with far more dynamic and fluid situations that are difficult to untangle. As an evaluation partner, CCHE emphasizes:

• Using tools and frameworks to strategically identify what stakeholders want the initiative to accomplish and how to measure progress made along the way. For example, CCHE's policy spectrum allows us to assess changes in the policy environment and tangible outcomes.
• Leveraging our collaboration model to help community members, organizations, and funders demystify effective collaboration and identify collaboratives' role in achieving system change.
• Partnering with groups working across sectors in new ways to address complex challenges within social, economic, and environmental systems that shape health outcomes and well-being.