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U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Office of Clinical Performance and Health Impact

Division of Monitoring and Evaluation

The Division of Monitoring and Evaluation (DME) coordinates the agency’s work on monitoring service delivery and its impact on health outcomes, with new focus on Primary Health Care (PHC) strengthening. DME provides granular reporting on the care given by the agency’s providers at the bedside. It divides its monitoring and evaluation efforts into two workstreams, a comprehensive clinical performance monitoring program, and an agency-wide PHC system strengthening program.

Clinical Performance Monitoring

Indian Health Service providers face unique challenges to delivering high quality care due to a variety of geographic, financial, and cultural factors. Accordingly, OCPHI is developing a set of clinical indicators that reflect the various ways in which IHS providers deliver care in this environment. We will assess care along all lines of service delivery, and to ensure that we are being truly comprehensive in our analysis, we will define our scope of service using the WHO Universal Health Coverage Compendium, which is “a database of health services and intersectoral interventions” that defines the essential services required to maintain a healthy population using a taxonomy that can serve as a framework for comprehensive service delivery evaluation. 

doctor at work

Primary Health Care (PHC)

To measure agency-wide performance, IHS will adopt the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Primary Health Care Measurement Framework and Indicators. This is a set of measures proposed by WHO/UNICEF to be used by health systems to assess the impact of their efforts to strengthen Primary Health Care (PHC) capacity. In this context, PHC refers to the WHO/UNICEF health system construct described as “a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to health that combines three core components: multisectoral policy and action; empowered people and communities; and primary care and essential public health functions as the core of integrated health services.” OCPHI is leading a multi-stakeholder consensus development process to identify the most context relevant, feasible to collect, and actionable measures from the WHO/UNICEF menu for implementation in IHS.