Keywords: collective impact, population health
The concept of collective impact relies on aligning systems and organizations within a community towards a common population goal, usually a broadly defined and easy to understand population ideal like “Good health for everyone.” This approach leads many different entities and systems to change their activities in order to solve a complex set of problems. From an analytics viewpoint, each individual problem can be relatively easy to show progress against. For example, increasing the number of miles of bike trails in a community can contribute to better health for those that use them. But, the contribution these trails may have is variable with regard to intensity and time committed for individuals and only a small proportion of the community is likely to use the trails. Because of the limited impact across the population and the long time horizon for results to be realized, critics often cite low return on investment for projects like bike trails. Therefore, an easy to quantify process measure like miles of bike trails can devolve into an expensive quest for individual level data that confirms progress towards better health for those that using trails. The collective impact approach attempts to enlist organizations that can contribute to the common goal, designed to reach a critical mass of the population to achieve and sustain change over time. Part of the collective impact strategy is to establish shared measurement of processes that can begin to illustrate the benefit of mutually reinforcing activities. When these benefits begin to be realized, behavior in the entities, and a growing number of their partners, begins to change in a way that supports their common goal. Analytically connecting complex and disparate process measures to mutually agreed upon outcomes can be a challenge, especially over the relatively long time frames necessary to impact health outcomes. Visual and statistical indicators of collective impact progress will be presented.