Measuring and Tracking Education Program Implementation: The Minnesota Heart Health Program Experience

Abstract

In an overall framework uniting program planning and evaluation, process evalua tion can assist community-based health promotion programs in establishing participa tion objectives, monitoring their achievement and the quality of interventions used, and translating these into useful information for managing and developing programs. This research reports on efforts by the Minnesota Heart Health Program to develop a system that permitted tracking educational program contacts, its implementation, and its use to make management decisions about program activities. The system was devel oped as part of a planning and evaluation framework with specific criteria for develop ing and tracking educational programs drawn from the social-learning literature. Over all, the system helped to make participation objectives more concrete, aided decision making about allocation of personnel and material resources, and encouraged the development of innovative programs.