FAQs
What type of user does this website target?What type of tools can I find on this site?
How does the toolkit bring together public health and clinical practice?
What are the 5 A's?
What is the "Chronic Care Model?"
What is the difference between the community toolkit and the practice toolkit?
Where can I, as community provider, find advice on partnering with a healthcare practice?
What is a PBRN?
What is AHRQ?
Why am I being asked for my profession?
What does the rating on the studies mean?
Where do these tools come from?
What type of user does this website target?
The ACCTION Pack is geared toward any health practitioners or community professionals who want to work together to prevent disease by promoting better health. The tools contained within the site are geared to all levels of user experience, ranging from straightforward advice to tools complex system design change tools.
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What type of tools can I find on this site?
Within the ACCTION Pack you will find a wide variety of resources, such as simple assessment tools, patient hand-outs, suggested educational websites, or descriptions of various lab tests, as well as comprehensive intervention tools that guide delivery system change.
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How does the toolkit bring together public health and clinical practice? The ACCTION Pack offers both partnership advice and a variety of tools designed to facilitate preventive medicine throughout communities in the U.S.
For example:
- Healthcare providers can use the Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (ACIC) survey (McColl Institute, Seattle, WA) to assess the existing needs and resources of their practices in order to identify areas to target for improved care. They can then seek community organizations who have mutual interests.
- Community practitioners can use the "Community Toolkit" to assess its community's needs and then learn some ways of finding a practice to link with in order to address those needs.
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What are the 5 A's of behavioral counseling?
AHRQ advocates use a Five A's construct to organize a general approach to assisting patients with behavioral counseling issues:
- Assess: Ask about/assess behavioral health risk(s) and factors affecting choice of behavior change goals/methods.
- Advise: Give clear, specific, and personalized behavior change advice, including information about personal health harms/benefits.
- Agree: Collaboratively select appropriate treatment goals and methods based on the patient's interest in and willingness to change the behavior.
- Assist: Using behavior change techniques (self-help and/or counseling), aid the patient in achieving agreed-upon goals by acquiring the skills, confidence, and social/environmental supports for behavior change, supplemented with adjunctive medical treatments when appropriate (e.g., pharmacotherapy for tobacco dependence, contraceptive drugs/devices).
- Arrange: Schedule follow-up contacts (in person or by telephone) to provide ongoing assistance/support and to adjust the treatment plan as needed, including referral to more intensive or specialized treatment.
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What is the, "Chronic Care Model?"
The Chronic Care Model identifies the essential elements of a health care system that encourage high-quality chronic disease care. These elements are the community, the health system, self-management support, delivery system design, decision support and clinical information systems. Evidence-based change concepts under each element, in combination, foster productive interactions between informed patients who take an active part in their care and providers with resources and expertise.
Overview of the Chronic Care Model
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What is the difference between the Community Toolkit and the Practice Toolkit?
The Community Toolkit focuses on strategies to help community professionals to (1) assess the preventive health and chronic disease needs of the local population and the existing resources available to address those needs and (2) identify and apply evidence-based principles to expand resources to improve health and prevent illness for that population. The Practice Toolkit focuses on aiding healthcare practitioners to apply an analogous approach to needs assessment and quality improvement at the practice level. Both Toolkits advise users on how to build partnerships between and across the clinical and community sectors of the healthcare system. The same tools are available no matter where on the website a user begins.
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Where can I, as community provider, find advice on partnering with a healthcare practice?
Once you "join" and log-in as a community provider, you will be taken to the Community Toolkit main page, where you will view a "mindmap," which can be used as a starting page for all aspects of the toolkit. As you move your cursor over the "mindmap", you will see a variety of links to take you to different aspects of the site.
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What Is a PBRN?
A PBRN or Practice Based Research Network is group of ambulatory practices devoted principally to the primary care of patients, and affiliated in their mission to investigate questions related to community-based practice and to improve the quality of primary care. This definition includes a sense of ongoing commitment to network activities and an organizational structure that transcends a single research project.
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What is AHRQ?
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is the lead federal agency charged with improving the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans. As one of 12 agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, AHRQ supports health services research that will improve the quality of health care and promote evidence-based decision making.
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Why am I being asked for my profession?
The ACCTION Pack offers guidance and tools that address both diads of the clinical practice-public health partnership. Providing your profession helps us to present different aspects of the toolkit to you in the most relevant and informative way. However, all areas are accessible through the navigational bar on the left.
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What does the study rating mean?
All studies identified as possible sources for evidence-based assessment or intervention "tools" underwent a formal assessment of both internal validity and generalizability to the primary care setting. Studies involving assessment tools were reviewed using a scoring system developed from the STARD criteria for assessing the quality of diagnostic studies. Studies of intervention strategies were evaluated using the Effective Public Health Practice Quality Assessment Tool and scored using the modified Jadad rating scale (Moher, et al. 1996) with added assessment of allocation concealment as recommended by Kjaergard, et al. 2001. Each scoring scheme was transformed to a 5-point scale, in which 5-points indicates the highest quality (i.e. internal validity).
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Where do these tools come from?
All "tools" available on through the web-portal are intended to provide evidence-based strategies for assessment, intervention, or implementation. These tools were identified from websites or published research literature. Website sources were restricted to primarily governmental sites sponsored by CDC, NIH, AHRQ, or HRSA, or to highly supported academic or private foundation sites, including the University of Kansas "Community Tool Box," the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the McColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation. Search engines used to identify research involving formal approaches to assessment and intervention for chronic illness care and prevention included PubMed, the Cochrane Clinical Trials Register, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), and the AHRQ National Guideline Clearinghouse. All "tools" and their sources underwent a formal review process involving previously developed quality appraisal forms (see "What Does the Study Rating Mean?" above).
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