The Public Health Foundation (PHF) is dedicated to enhancing the infrastructure of public health agencies to manage and improve performance through developing tools to assist practitioners understand performance management (PM) and develop PM systems.
Public health departments are often forced to operate in a crisis mode, filled with disruptions on a regular basis from public health threats (e.g., H1N1 outbreak) and diminishing budgets to shifting priorities. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in March 2011, PHF published a free book online titled
Modular kaizen: Dealing with Disruptions, which aims to help health departments achieve quick improvements in disruptive environments. PHF is also providing PM consultation and training to health departments to help save lives, cut costs, and get better results by managing performance. In an effort to support the
National Public Health Improvement Initiative (NPHII), which is funded through the ACA, PHF is providing PM and quality improvement (QI) consultation and training in the field to NPHII Component II grantees. Available through PHF are a host of services to assist public health departments in setting measures to achieve targets, using rapid cycle
Plan-Do-Check-Act, for increased efficiencies and improved documentation of results. In addition, PHF has already provided PM and QI webinars and training sessions for 77 NPHII Component I grantees; as long as funding is available, PHF will continue to provide such support to NPHII grantees based on their needs, as a part of coordinated technical assistance offered by several partner organizations.
Through a competitive grant process, PHF received funding to support these activities through the
Affordable Care Act Prevention and Public Health Fund. This federal investment is designed to build, expand and sustain the necessary capacity to prevent disease, detect it early, manage conditions before they become severe, and provide states and communities the resources they need to promote healthy living. In FY2010, $500 million of the Prevention Fund was distributed to states and communities to boost prevention and public health efforts, improve health, enhance health care quality, and foster the next generation of primary health professionals.