The project team conducted an environmental scan consisting of a literature search of five major health and social science databases as well as targeted and general Internet searches. The environmental scan identified a few studies that used existing measures relevant to clinical-community resource relationships. The Atlas reports on five measures from two studies specifically related to both primary care and community resources for the delivery of clinical preventive services (Holtrop et al., 2008; Krist et al., 2008). Each of the five measures pertains to four preventive services: alcohol misuse counseling; healthy diet counseling; obesity screening and counseling for adults; and tobacco use counseling and interventions for non-pregnant adults. These measures assessed the proportion of patients referred for services, the proportion that met with a referral liaison, or the proportion that initiated the intended behavior change.
With so few studies having used existing measures related to clinical-community resource relationships for delivery of clinical preventive services, a forthcoming report listing ideas for “candidate” measures, is being produced for AHRQ in conjunction with the Measures Atlas and this Roadmap. The report, to be released later this year, describes potentially valuable measures for use and/or future development and classifies measures into domains grounded in the conceptual framework. The candidate measure report underscores the need for standard, validated measures for researchers and evaluators interested in the effectiveness of clinical-community resource relationships for the delivery of clinical preventive services.