Evaluating Public Health Financing, Programs, and Services

University of Kentucky will conduct an environmental scan, including a review of published literature and other information about public health financing, such as reports from NACCHO and ASTHO. Data and resources contained within the University of Kentucky's National Coordinating Center for PHSSR will facilitate the quick and thorough development of the environmental scan. Searches will be conducted using NLM Gateway, SciVerse Scopus, and websites that have health reports not published in scholarly journals (e.g., government reports, reports from foundations, reports from national public health associations such as NACCHO and ASTHO, universities and other research organizations). UK will also utilize a ¡§snowballing¡¨ process in which the bibliographies or citation from any given source are examined to identify others who in turn supply appropriate documents. UK will only identify materials that have become available within the last ten years. UK will gather information about the following topics: „h Methods that have been used in past studies to assess public health financing, including the benefits and disadvantages of different approaches; „h Information about how public health systems receive reimbursement for clinical services and how they cover infrastructure expenses; „h Information about where public health funding goes, and how much of that funding remains within the governmental sector (local public health) relative to other entities that comprise the broader public health system (such as NGOs and hospitals). „h Which states would make particularly interesting targets for site visits, based on the criteria described in Task 4; and „h What shifts have occurred in health departments as a result of ACA and other recent policy changes, which may be issues to explore during the site visits. If it is available, one of the key sources UK will consult in the environmental scan is the report of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on Public Health Strategies to Improve Health, which is scheduled to be released in fall 2011. UK will extract from this report items for consideration in designing data collection and analysis strategies, as well as key themes to explore with health department staff and other experts. UK will provide a summary of the information found through the environmental scan in a memorandum format between 20 and 30 pages long. It will succinctly describe what is currently known about public health financing in the United States. UK will submit the draft environmental scan summary within 10 weeks of the EDOC. Within one week of the COTR's comments NORC will work with UK to incorporate these comments into a final environmental scan summary.