National Coordinating Center for Public Health Services and Systems Research

The current portfolio of RWJF]funded PBRN research projects focuses broadly on identifying and understanding practice variation in public health, distinguishing desirable from unwarranted variation, and elucidating strategies for reducing unwarranted variation. This work is fundamentally about evaluating the process of public health delivery. The upcoming 2013 PBRN solicitation will focus more specifically on elucidating the costs of delivering public health services, and identifying the factors that influence these costs. The evidence from this work will be extremely useful in defining implementation strategies for transforming the governmental public health enterprise under health reform and accreditation, and it is also a critically important step down the pathway toward documenting the value and return]on]investment associated with public health services and delivery systems. Looking ahead to 2014, we suggest taking the PBRN research portfolio to the next step in this pathway to gvalue estimationh by focusing on elucidating the benefits of public health delivery from a multi]stakeholder and multi]sector perspective. This direction responds directly to themes that emerged during the Public Health Teamfs strategic stakeholder meeting held just before the RWJF 40th Anniversary in October 2012, and also to ideas that surfaced more recently at AcademyHealthfs December 2012 Population Health research strategy meeting. The evidence from this proposed line of PBRN inquiry will allow the policy and practice communities to identify with much greater specificity when and where there is a gbusiness caseh for investing in the public health enterprise: what activities and delivery system elements generate the benefits, which stakeholders realize them, over what time frames, and under what circumstances.1 This evidence will also have direct policy implications regarding who should contribute in financing a transformed public health enterprise, and through what mechanisms.