Appendix A
Committee on Using Performance Monitoring to Improve Community Health
VISION STATEMENT
(August 1, 1995)
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Using Performance Monitoring to Improve Community Health intends to consider, from a systems perspective, the roles that the public health and personal health care systems and other stakeholders play in influencing community-wide health, how their performance of those roles can be monitored, and how a “public health performance monitoring” (PHPM) system can be used to foster collaboration among these sectors and promote improvements in community health. The committee's goal is to develop prototypical sets of indicators for specific public health concerns that communities can use to monitor the performance of public health agencies, personal health care organizations, and other entities with a stake in these matters. The committee will collect and analyze information on existing and planned systems related to public health performance monitoring, confer with experts in the field individually and through workshops, and prepare a written report that sets out principles of public health performance monitoring from a systems perspective, and illustrates these principles in a practical manner.
For PHPM to serve the core functions of public health—assessment, policy, and assurance—the committee foresees a need for an infrastructure for public health information. This information infrastructure would need to monitor diverse phenomena in the many sectors that contribute to the health of populations, including clinical care, environmental services, individual and public education, community social services, and public policy promoting behavioral change, among others. It also would need to employ measurement strategies far more sophisticated than those in current use; provide information on the health status of a community, including threats to its future health; inform decisions about how to improve the health of the public; and document change in community health and in performance of health-related functions. In such a
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