How Do You Illustrate Your Program's Successes Through Evaluation?

Nearly 10 years ago at the Seton Asthma Center, in Austin, Texas, we experienced alarming numbers of ER visits and readmission rates for pediatric asthma patients in our community. We began to question our methods: Where were our gaps? What could we enhance? And more importantly, how could we better serve our community? In short, we wanted to understand how to provide better, comprehensive asthma management to the children we treated to improve their quality of life.

We took this as an opportunity to evaluate our programmatic goals and activities to determine how to achieve the results that would align with our goals of improving asthma health outcomes. After implementing new strategies, including how we conducted asthma education outreach to families, we started to see fewer children returning to the ER. However, in order to determine if we achieved success, we really needed to measure our results. To do so, we tracked patients’ doctor and ER visits for one year, as well as had patients complete quality of life assessments. Coupling this information with their previous year’s medical history allowed us to do a comparative evaluation of each child’s condition. 

The results were amazing. We saw an almost 50 percent decline in ER visits, a 90 percent decrease in patient visits and a positive return on investment – for every dollar we spent on program expenses, we were able to demonstrate a $5 return. It is because of our evaluation efforts that I am able to describe the positive impact our program has had on managing asthma in our community. This impact has been a great asset in communicating the value we bring to our stakeholders.

How does your program measure its impact? Has evaluation helped you showcase your program’s successes to your stakeholders? What tools or resources were helpful to you during the process of evaluating your program?

Tell us about your ideas and knowledge of evaluation by starting a discussion or sharing a resource with us and telling us how your program is working to measure its successes.  

About the author: Steve Conti has been with the Seton Family of Hospitals for 15 years and currently serves as the Director of Disease Management.