Communicating the financial return on investment of public health interventions is essential for understanding the full context of a program on community health and reducing biases in program evaluation (Edwards & Lawrence, 2021). Our goal is to identify a method that Wood County Health Department (WCHD) can use to evaluate its Providers and Teens Communicating for Health (PATCH) Program and which can potentially be applied to their other various preventive public health interventions. Our chosen method will allow key PATCH stakeholders such as WCHD, PATCH staff, and community members to determine the impact of the intervention for evaluation and may lead to future funding. By identifying and evaluating the cost of services and resources added to an intervention and calculating the net monetary outcome, stakeholders can use this information to determine the effectiveness of their intervention goal relative to the invested costs. Our chosen economic analysis method will have to be feasible for Wood County, a rural health department with limited access to health records and data, and clearly communicate dollar value of the program, which is generally preferred by Wood County
stakeholders as well as being easy to understand and compare across programs. After conducting a literature review, our project team found three measures that communicate the value of interventions. The first measure we considered was the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA), the second measure was Return on Investment (ROI) (and its subtype, Social Return on Investment [SROI]), and the third measure was Cost Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) (and its subtype, Cost-Utility Analysis [CUA]). When considering these measures, it is important to identify the perspective of the analysis to determine the appropriate and relevant costs and benefits. This may include the costs to a health department program (i.e. cost of an intervention) and how it differs from the costs to an individual (i.e. out-of-pocket cost for a hospital stay). Our final analysis will recommend the implementation of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) as the measure for WCHD to use to communicate the impact of their public health interventions
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