We had the pleasure of partnering with ICH’s research team for our large research project that included both multi-state focus groups and key informant interviews. The COVID-19 pandemic added another unexpected level of complexity to our project. Amid these challenges, we couldn’t have asked for a better team of folks to problem solve with. The ICH team remained flexible, responsive, and eager to help us problem solve and keep the research moving. They jumped right into the detailed, complex subject matter of our project and a change in focus group format, enthusiastically learning with us as we adapted to a rapidly changing research environment. The team at ICH were critical partners in making sure our focus group outreach and coordination was a success, while ensuring the data we collected was top quality.

“The Partnership for Community Health (PCH) was fortunate to have ICH as a thought partner in our work. Their extraordinarily thoughtful team worked alongside program staff to develop a shared learning agenda, design a high-quality, mixed-methods evaluation approach – guided by a participatory framework – and inclusively involve members of the team in all aspects of the evaluation design, implementation, and dissemination process. ICH’s approach involved an important combination of rigor, data-driven decision-making and shared learning, which fostered lasting, sustainable improvements in health center operations across the state. The ICH team tailored the PCH evaluation to support the unique program needs of each grantee, provided actionable insights along the way, and shared best practices and lessons learned through the program locally and nationally.”

“We’ve worked with the Institute for Community Health for many, many years. They provide incredible knowledge and expertise beyond what we have available at our organization. They have worked with us to tailor our evaluation efforts, so that the results are useful and can guide decisions about programmatic changes.”

Their systematic approaches to program evaluation with emphasis on direct patient and provider feedback, supported by relevant data has helped us improve our services in many areas … We could not ask for a more patient centered and quality focused partner, and we continue to value every bit of our collaboration with ICH.

We particularly appreciate ICH’s focus on making sure that evaluation data is useful. ICH has created tools that help us understand our data in new ways – and make us wish we had these tools for all of our projects! Their collaborative approach makes evaluation fun rather than a burden.

The quality of the ICH team’s work is excellent. … the retrospective pre-post surveys are just what we needed to (a) help us with continuous quality improvement, and (b) document and demonstrate the impact of the workshops.

When I first started working with ICH I had a pretty bad attitude about evaluation, but after working with them for more than two years I’ve really changed my thinking! Our work as an advocacy organization is notoriously difficult to evaluate, and on top of that we were pursuing a fairly cutting edge program. Unlike other evaluators I’ve been exposed to, ICH doesn’t use a cookie-cutter approach. Instead, they use a “boutique” approach: they invest in listening and learning from us about what we’re trying to achieve, and then they tailor the evaluation so that the finished product is highly useful, not just something that sits on a shelf.

“It has been very rewarding working with the ICH Team. It is reassuring to know that I can call on them when I am not sure of my next move”