The Institute of Medicine will host a meeting to catalyze a conversation about re-envisioning how we evaluate community health initiatives using designs that better match their purpose, advantages, and realities.

During this meeting, we hope to accomplish the following:

1. Share community perspectives on creating health. A large part of the meeting will consist of listening to and working with an example community to illustrate ways of ensuring that interventions and evaluations are consistent with their aims.

2. Share approaches to designing evaluations. This meeting will focus on the process of designing an evaluation, including determining who will be influenced by the results of an evaluation, the questions we want to answer, and how to answer them. The meeting will be an opportunity to learn about and discuss some examples of robust evaluation approaches, many of which are used successfully outside the health sector but have not yet been as widely adopted for health interventions.

This meeting does not delve into the details of specific methodologies, but focuses on planning a road map to help select among methodologies with different comparative advantages to get the best fit for different kinds of evaluation aims. The meeting will highlight that there are multiple good practices in evaluation design that can be applied to community health initiatives, rather than a single best practice or ideal design.

3. Foster connections among people who want to think differently about health evaluation. We hope that this meeting connects people who have the collective insight and influence necessary to forge new pathways in health evaluation.

4. Explore ideas for future related topics. If new evaluation designs are to become well-accepted and lead to smarter investments, what will interested participants need to learn about and do next?