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.

Submit a Promising Practice

Staying Alive Drug Overdose Prevention and Response Program (Baltimore, MD)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Alcohol & Drug Use, Urban

Goal: The goals of the Staying Alive program are to teach drug users about how to recognize opiate overdose signs and symptoms, how to respond to any overdose cases by calling 911, and how to use rescue breathing and naloxone administration to reduce life-threatening drug overdose.

Impact: Staying Alive reduces mortality due to opiate and heroin drug overdose.

Strong-For-Life (Boston, MA)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Physical Activity, Older Adults

Goal: The goal of Strong-For-Life home-based exercise program is to promote activity and reduce disability among older adults.

Impact: Home-based resistance exercise programs designed for older persons with disabilities hold promise as an effective public health strategy.

Sunday Streets (San Francisco, CA)

Filed under Good Idea, Health / Wellness & Lifestyle, Children, Teens, Adults, Families, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban

Goal: The goal of Sunday Streets is to provide safe, fun outdoor spaces in different neighborhoods across the city that encourage physical activity.

Tai Chi -- Moving for Better Balance

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

Goal: To use tai chi exercise to improve balance and decrease incidence of falls among older adults.

Impact: The program shows that ta chi can significantly improve health-related outcome measures in older adults and such a program can be practically and effectively implemented and maintained in community settings.

Tailored Caregiver Assessment and Referral (TCARE)

Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Older Adults, Older Adults

Goal: TCARE supports Area Agencies on Aging (AAAs) by strengthening agencies' abilities to support family caregivers through its Evidence-Based software and protocol.

Tailoring Family Planning Services to the Special Needs of Adolescents (Central Pennsylvania)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Health Care Access & Quality, Teens, Women, Rural

Goal: The goal of the study was to address the special psychosocial needs of adolescents and increase contraception use, equip adolescents with the education needed to make responsible decisions related to family planning matters, and decrease unintended pregnancies.

Impact: After a one-year follow-up, teens were less likely to be pregnant. Intermediate findings at six months showed that teens in the experimental group were more likely to continue using a birth control method and less likely to experience difficulty in dealing with contraceptive-related problems.

Teen Health Project (cities in Wisconsin, Virginia, and Washington)

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

Goal: The goal of the Teen Health Project is to provide adolescents with the skills necessary to prevent HIV risk behaviors.

Impact: The Teen Health Project shows that community-level interventions that include skills training and engage adolescents in neighborhood-based HIV prevention activities can produce and maintain reductions in sexual risk behavior, including delaying sexual debut and increasing condom use.

Teen Outreach Program: Palm Beach (Boyton Beach, Florida/Palm Beach County, Florida)

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health, Teens, Urban

Goal: To enable teens from disadvantaged circumstances to develop healthy behaviors, life skills, and a sense of purpose in order to prevent problem behaviors.

Impact: This program equips teens to better develop healthy behaviors and relationships,
develop life and leadership skills, and achieve educational
success.

Telecommuting Program - Arizona (Maricopa County, AZ)

Filed under Effective Practice, Community / Transportation

Goal: The State of Arizona's original interest in telecommuting arose out of the search for solutions to common issues facing many areas in the United States: traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption. However, Arizona has found that telecommuting is a powerful management tool that increases employee productivity while reducing the cost of employee turnover.

Telehealth Connections for Children and Youth (Florida)

Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Health Care Access & Quality, Children

Goal: The purpose of this project is to link Florida’s Title V program (CMS) and local Community Health Centers to:

- Reach and identify uninsured children with special health care needs in Florida and enroll them in insurance
- Focus on underserved communities that traditionally have faced numerous barriers to care, particularly those in the black and Hispanic communities, and children living in rural areas
- Use telemedicine to facilitate enrollment in CMS, care coordination, and access to specialty care
- Work with trusted community elders -- grandmothers -- as lay health partners to facilitate health-related outreach and support to children with special health care needs and their families.

In short, the project seeks to build a sustainable medical home for children with special health care needs in the safety net.

An Effective Practice meets the following HCI criteria:

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.
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:

The program description includes: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program funding source, program implementation steps and outcomes.
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:

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.
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.
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.