The School of Public Health recently announced that it received a $250,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to help measure the impact of the Foundation’s grants and programs to improve the quality and impact of public health.
As part of the grant, a team of researchers from the School of Public Health will assist RWJF's Public Health Team in the maintenance, updating and refinement of performance indicators, as well as monitor the selected indicators and report on their findings on a quarterly basis.
The research at the School of Public Health will be led by Dr. David Barton Smith, a research professor at the school’s Center for Health Equality. Dr. Smith has taught program evaluation, strategic planning and management information systems in health care management master’s and doctoral programs for thirty years. He received a 1995 RWJF Health Policy Research Investigator Award for research on the legacy of the racial segregation in health care and continues to do research on this topic. He is the author or co-author of five books on the organization of health services, and more than 35 peer reviewed health service research journal articles. Dr. Smith received his PhD in Health Services Research from the University of Michigan, and his master’s degree in Social Sciences from Michigan State University.
"The investments in public health take a place in a changing and uncertain environment," said Dr. Smith. "For example, the new fiscal difficulties being faced by city and county governments may make it important to track how public health funding fares relative to the budgets of other city and county services rather than just the total funding for public health. We plan on tracking a wide variety of public health indicators that are related to the initiatives supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and its Public Health Team."
For more information, please visit the Center for Health Equality.