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Promising Practices

The Promising Practices database informs professionals and community members about documented approaches to improving community health and quality of life.

The ultimate goal is to support the systematic adoption, implementation, and evaluation of successful programs, practices, and policy changes. The database provides carefully reviewed, documented, and ranked practices that range from good ideas to evidence-based practices.
Learn more about the ranking methodology.

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Healthy IDEAS (Houston, TX)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Older Adults, Older Adults, Urban

Goal: The goal of Healthy IDEAS is to detect and address depression through effective, evidence-based screening and health promotion education.

Impact: Studies show that after 6 months in the Healthy IDEAS program, significantly more of the participants knew how to get help for depression (93% versus 68%), reported that increasing activity helped them feel better (89% versus 72%), and reported reduced pain (45% versus 16%) than at the beginning.

Healthy Love (Atlanta, GA)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Women, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban

Goal: Healthy Love seeks to provide a safe, culturally tailored intervention for heterosexual black women to reduce their disproportionately high risk of transmitting and contracting HIV and other STDs. Healthy Love aims to encourage sexual abstinence, HIV testing, and receipt of test results; increase women's condom usage during vaginal sex with male partners; and reduce the number of women's sex partners and unprotected anal and vaginal sex with male partners. Healthy Love also seeks to improve HIV/STD knowledge, self-efficacy for using condoms, intentions to use condoms, and attitudes towards condoms.

Impact: Healthy Love increased participants' likelihood of using condoms, being tested for HIV, and receiving their test results. The intervention also reduced participants' self-described actions with male partners that can increase black women's risks for HIV infection.

Home Vaccination Intervention (Melbourne, Australia)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Children, Urban

Goal: The goal of this intervention is to promote catch-up immunizations for children who are behind the recommended immunization schedule.

Impact: Home vaccination for children behind in their immunization schedule is an effective and relatively cheap method of completing recommended vaccinations, and can be particularly beneficial for disadvantaged families.

Home-Delivered Meals Postdischarge From Heart Failure Hospitalization (GOURMET-HF) (Columbia University Medical Center, the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Health System, and the University of Michigan Health System)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Heart Disease & Stroke, Adults, Women, Men, Older Adults

Goal: The goals of GOURMET-HF are to assess the safety of the intervention, including effects on cardiac biomarkers and rehospitalization burden.

Impact: Home-delivered DASH/SRD after HF hospitalization appear safe in selected patients and had favorable effects on HF clinical status and 30-day readmissions. The GOURMET-HF pilot study suggests that postdischarge nutritional support has the potential to improve HF symptoms and reduce readmissions

HORIZONS (Atlanta, GA)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Adolescent Health, Teens, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: The goal of the HORIZONS program is to reduce sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), particularly HIV, by increasing condom use and partner communication about safer sex.

Impact: The HORIZONS program empowered African American female adolescents to pursue safer sex and reduced the number of STDs among those in the program.

I Can Problem Solve (ICPS)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Mental Health & Mental Disorders, Children

Goal: The goal of this program is to teach children effective problem-solving skills.

Impact: Studies demonstrated that ICPS participants scored better than the control group on impulsiveness, inhibition, and total behavior problems; showed fewer high-risk behaviors than never-trained controls; showed improvement in positive, prosocial behaviors and decreases in antisocial behaviors; and performed better on standardized achievement tests.

Illinois WISEWOMAN Program (Illinois)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Physical Activity, Women

Goal: The Illinois WISEWOMAN program (IWP) aims to lower heart disease and other chronic disease risk factors through screening and lifestyle classes for women in high-risk populations in service counties throughout Illinois.

Impact: The Illinois WISEWOMAN Program addresses the disproportionate risk of cardiovascular disease among disadvantaged, low-income women. Participation in the program has been shown to improve dietary, physical activity and cardiovascular outcomes.

Immunization Case Management Intervention (Los Angeles, CA)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Children, Families, Urban

Goal: The goal of this immunization case management intervention is to improve immunization rates among infants of low-income, urban, African American families.

Impact: Immunization case management increased the knowledge of immunization schedules, rate of well-child visits, and up-to-date immunization rate for children of participating families.

Improving Colorectal Cancer Screening Among the Medically Underserved (Chicago, IL)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Cancer, Adults, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban

Goal: The goal of this program is to increase provider recommendation and patient compliance with colorectal cancer screening at a federally qualified health center serving low-income patients.

Impact: The intervention appears to be a feasible means to improve colorectal cancer screening rates among patients served by community health centers. However, more attention to patient decision making and education may be needed to further increase screening rates.

It's Your Game: Keep It Real (Texas)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Adolescent Health, Teens

Goal: The goal of It's Your Game: Keep It Real is to reduce teen pregnancy, prevent STI transmission, and delay teen sexual activity in middle school students.

Impact: Participants in the It’s Your Game: Keep It Real intervention program were less likely to initiate sex by the ninth grade when compared to the control group.

An Effective Practice meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes at a minimum: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program implementation steps, and outcomes that have demonstrated program success and/or promise in achieving the program goal in one or more localities.
  2. The results from an evaluation of the program include quantitative measures of improvement in outcome of interest (i.e. increase in voter registration, not just delivery of voter registration drive) and/ or the outcome measure is increased or improved compared to the baseline measurement or the control group but the difference is not statistically significant.

A Good Idea meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program funding source, program implementation steps and outcomes.
  2. The program evaluation is limited to descriptive measure(s) of success/accomplishment (i.e., program participation rates, number of services/education sessions/radio messages provided). Note: oftentimes, the program has been newly implemented and a program evaluation has not yet been conducted. Programs that have not yet been evaluated, but which show promise in improving health or quality of life, are classified as Good Ideas until an evaluation is conducted.

An Evidence-Based Practice meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes at a minimum: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program implementation steps, and outcomes that have demonstrated program success in achieving the program goal in one or more localities.
  2. The results from an evaluation of the program include quantitative measures showing improvement in the outcome(s) of interest after the implementation of the program (i.e. increase in smoking cessation, not just the delivery of a smoking cessation program). The outcome measure(s) is/are compared at relevant time periods before and after the intervention or program implementation. Alternatively, the evaluation study compares the outcome(s) between an intervention group and an appropriate control group.
  3. The study is of peer-review quality and presents numbers in a scientific manner; measurements of precision and reliability are included (e.g. confidence intervals, standard errors), results from statistical tests show a significant difference or change in the outcome measure(s), and relevant point estimates and p-values are presented. Note: if the results from an evaluation of a program are presented in a scientific manner and the outcome measure is improved compared to the baseline measurement or the control group but the difference is not statistically significant, the practice is classified as effective and not evidence-based.