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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.

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Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children, Urban

Goal: The goal of Parent Connext is to support parents in reducing and/or preventing toxic stress in the family and help children develop critical life skills and coping skills. Recent studies have found that up to 50% of health outcomes are attributable to social and economic factors and that lifetime costs associated with child maltreatment are comparable to other costly healthcare conditions such as stroke or type 2 diabetes. Moreover, 4 in 5 physicians report lacking confidence in their ability to meet patients’ social needs, which can impede their ability to provide high quality medical care. As a result, interventions that target parents’ social needs may have important implications for reducing healthcare costs and have the added benefit of enabling physicians to provide high-quality care to their patients.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Oral Health, Children, Families, Urban

Goal: The goal of this intervention was to involve pediatricians to help reduce rates of early childhood caries.

Impact: The multifaceted ECC intervention was associated with increased provider knowledge and counseling, and significantly attenuated incidence of ECC, showing that similar interventions could have the potential to make a significant public health impact on reducing ECC among young children.

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

Goal: The goal of this program is to increase colorectal cancer screening rates among older primary care patients.

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

Goal: The Goal of this Promising Practice is to determine whether a tailored community health worker (CHW) intervention would improve post-hospital outcomes among low-SES patients.

Impact: This intervention would improve access to primary care and quality of discharge while controlling recurrent readmissions in a high-risk population. Health systems may leverage the CHW workforce to improve post-hospital outcomes by addressing behavioral and socioeconomic drivers of disease.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Cancer, Adults, Rural

Goal: The goal of this program is to improve communication between providers and patients about colorectal cancer screening.

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

Goal: The goal of the Community AIDS Prevention Program is to educate inner city Latino adolescents about how to reduce risk related to HIV/AIDS, and to encourage sexually active teens to use condoms.

Impact: This program shows that prevention programs targeting HIV/AIDS risk-reduction strategies and condom use encouragement can delay male initiation of sexual intercourse, reduce females' number of sexual partners, and increase likelihood of possessing a condom among sexually active youth.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Physical Activity, Children, Urban

Goal: To promote water consumption with an educational and environmental intervention in elementary schools of deprived urban areas to prevent overweight.

Impact: This program shows that environmental and educational, school-based interventions can have effective impact in the prevention of overweight among children in elementary school, even in a population from socially-deprived areas.

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

Goal: The goal of the Reach for health Community Youth Service program is to reduce risky sexual behaviors among urban Latino and African American youth.

Impact: Long-term impact has been recorded among participants after two years: this includes delayed initiation of intercourse and reduced frequency of intercourse among sexually active adolescents.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Other Conditions

Goal: The goal of this study is to determine how many Community Health Workers (CHW) would be needed to reduce emergency department (ED) visits and associated hospitalizations among their assigned patients to be cost-neutral from a payer's perspective.

Impact: This study adds significant knowledge to the existing literature on CHW programs, and particularly provides critical information to payers that can be used for making decisions on appropriate payment models

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Immunizations & Infectious Diseases, Women, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban

Goal: SAHARA is a computer-based HIV intervention that targets African American women to promote healthy sexual behaviors to reduce the risk of HIV transmission.

Impact: These findings which demonstrate major improvements in HIV-preventive behaviors suggest that SAHARA is an effective evidence-based promising practice; it is inexpensive and only requires two hours.

Greater Hampton Roads