Developing Performance Measures for Public Health Agencies: Strategic Benefits of Applying the Balanced Scorecard Framework to Local Public Health Agencies

Public health is what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy. The local public health agency is the governmental entity with a leadership role in adressing complex health issues associated with promoting the public¿s health and safety in communities. This book outlines the process undertaken by a set of local public health agencies and central program offices in the Florida Department of Health to translate the mission of the public health into measures of performance based on evidence and expert opinion. The Balanced Scorecard system developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton guided the selection of the performance indicators in the key system areas of finance, customers, innovation and learning, and internal processes. The major contributions of this work were the hypothesizing of linkages across measures and perspectives of the system to expected outcomes, the establishment of a process for building balanced scorecards for public health, and the identification of common areas for improvement and core measures of performance for use across multiple public health agencies.