The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Common Ground Program awarded Common Ground grants to 31 public health agencies throughout the country in an effort to help state and local public health agencies better respond to health needs by improving their use of information systems. 

Common Ground aims to:

• Persuade public health agencies to integrate informatics principles and sound development methodologies to improve the delivery of public health services.
• Examine existing public health service business processes and define requirements for the information systems used to support these processes.
• Help agencies develop new information system requirements that are more effective and that streamline the delivery of essential public health services.
• Minimize duplicative efforts by identifying common business processes and information system requirements that are applicable across the pubic health field.
• Encourage stakeholders at the local, state, and federal levels to endorse, adopt, and implement redesigned business processes and information system requirements that support public health preparedness and chronic disease prevention and control.

RWJF contracted with NORC at the University of Chicago to conduct a four-year, multi-method evaluation to assess:  the process by which grantees implemented the Common Ground framework; challenges encountered and how those challenges were addressed; the relationship between programmatic activities and intended as well as unanticipated consequences; and key elements necessary to achieve transformation of public health agency business practices and related information technology requirements.

For this project, NORC will complete detailed background data analyses of grantees, including an assessment of how representative grantees are of the general population of state and local health departments, conduct semi-structured telephone interviews and site visits with grantees, design and field pre- and post-initiative surveys of all Common Ground grantees, produce eight to ten detailed grantee case studies, and design and field surveys and conduct key informant interviews with non-grantee health departments focused on how lessons from the Common Ground experience may be translated to the broader set of public health agencies.