Health & Health Equity
The United States has some of the highest levels of health inequality in the industrialized world, despite spending significantly more on healthcare than many other developed nations.
While federal policies seek to improve the reach and affordability of the healthcare system, it will take significant work at the state and local levels—from moving legislation to educating communities—to change healthcare outcomes and perceptions nationwide.
Innovation Network recognizes the challenges and benefits of evaluating health initiatives, and has developed customized tools and frameworks to help our clients more effectively evaluate their work. Are your advocacy efforts affecting policy, and is policy impacting people’s health? Is your work reaching its target audiences? How does your health initiative lead to the change you want to see? We can help. Our insight comes from our experience: conducting real-world evaluations within the health advocacy field has been a cornerstone of our work over the last twenty years.
We partner with foundations and nonprofit organizations to evaluate a wide range of projects. In this section, we provide a sampling of both current and past work.
Missouri Foundation for Health
Since 2012, Innovation Network has supported the Missouri Foundation for Health (MFH) by evaluating the field of consumer health advocates in Missouri. The field-level evaluation approach is different from other types of evaluation, paying attention to patterns and trends across the entire set of advocates rather than specifically focusing on individual advocacy organizations or specific Foundation grantees. Findings have been used to inform MFH’s work within the field of consumer advocates and to support advocates as they learn, adapt, and refine their strategies.
Kansas Health Foundation, Healthy Communities Initiative
Innovation Network is partnering with the Kansas Health Foundation (KHF) to evaluate its Healthy Communities Initiative. Through this initiative, KHF is funding 20 communities throughout Kansas to promote policy, systems, and environmental changes that support Healthy Eating and Active Living (HEAL). Innovation Network has been working closely with KHF staff, the technical assistance team, and members of the Leadership Teams in each community to better understand progress made toward policy goals. This evaluation is designed to gather information from a variety of perspectives to better understand the depth and context of the work within each community.
National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO)
NACCHO, along with the Michigan Public Health Institute and other partners, is working to change the public health narrative in support of racial and health equity. The Public Narrative to Advance Health Equity project will use four workshops with local Michigan health departments and community organizers to inform the creation of a handbook on public narrative and health equity. This handbook will be an accessible tool to guide public health practitioners and their allies, for facilitated trainings and as a stand-alone educational tool. Innovation Network is evaluating the process to determine the effectiveness of the four workshops in identifying the most necessary, relevant, and clear information, as well as identifying the most effective learning methods to include in the handbook.
Connecticut Health Foundation
The Connecticut Health Foundation (CT Health) commissioned Innovation Network to conduct an in-depth evaluation of its Health Leadership Fellows Program (HLFP). This signature program ran for a decade and CT Health staff wanted to determine the program’s impact and effectiveness. Innovation Network worked with CT Health to identify a set of research questions to guide the evaluation, designed a suite of data collection approaches, and conducted in-depth qualitative data collection and analysis to document participants’ program experiences and outcomes. Our evaluation of CT Health’s Leadership Program led to a set of recommendations for CT Health to strengthen the program, to clarify the contribution of the program to the Foundation’s strategic plan, and to further develop its alumni network.
Selected clients include:
