Understanding and Assessing Partnership Connections in Public Health Departments

The researchers examined partnerships, designed to leverage limited resources and fulfill common missions, among state and local public health agencies and other organizations, agencies, and groups. In particular, they: 1) defined what good connectivity means in a public health partnership; 2) quantified good connectivity as percentile score measured against a standard; and 3) developed a tool to measure connectivity and document the analytic process through which the tool produces a connectivity score. The objective of this project was to develop a tool to allow public health partners to measure their multi-agency collaborations in order to strengthen them.