Community Health Metrics: Opportunities and Challenges

Please join us for the next HPRG meeting where we will explore both the potential and challenges presented by community health metrics and their implications for policy. We will have two presentations on the topic.

Robin Soler and Stephanie Frost will describe how the Community Transformation Grants (CTG), a CDC-funded initiative, is incorporating evidence-based strategies to improve the environment regarding tobacco-free living, active living and healthy eating, and clinical and community preventive services to prevent and control high blood pressure and high cholesterol. CDC is performing a number of data collection and evaluation efforts related to this initiative, including a context scan of 20 communities across the nation to determine the social, political, and environmental contexts where CTG program initiatives are being implemented. This presentation will describe the purpose of the context scan, how CDC will execute it, and how its results may contribute to the evidence base to prevent or manage chronic disease.

Michael Kramer will present on the data challenges associated with social determinants, neighborhood metrics and the resulting implications for chronic/infectious disease management, methods to measure residential segregation relating to health, and the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a tool to analyze community health.

Serving breakfast and coffee.