Twelfth Meeting: May 15, 2009

Secretary's Advisory Committee on
National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2020

Phase II – Voting on Structural Issues for Topic Areas & Finalizing Target-Setting Methods
Via WebEx

Twelfth Meeting: May 15, 2009

Committee Recommendations (Approved by Vote)

Topic Areas

• There is no advantage to aggregating topic areas under broader categories of the framework (e.g., interventions, determinants, and outcomes) as they could be aggregated in many different ways.
• The proposed list of 50 topic areas can be modified and expanded to meet the needs of users.
• Indexing should be used to help users easily access groups of related objectives.
• A logic model should be created for each topic area to help explain how objectives are related.

Target Setting

• Healthy People 2020 objectives should not have separate disparities targets. However, disparities are important, and progress on eliminating them should be separately tracked.
• Specific interventions to reduce disparities should be noted.
• Guidance to regions, states and localities should indicate that there is one national target, but that national target need not be the one that they will use for local-level planning and tracking.
• Guidance and tools for states, regions and localities to use in setting their own targets should include: a set of clear principles, a list of methods to be used, and a rationale for using each type of method.
• Whenever possible, Healthy People 2020 objectives should use science-based, S.M.A.R.T. targets. However, when evidence is not available for setting an S.M.A.R.T target, other methods can be used.
• Targets can be set using other methods as long as those methods are clearly described.

Committee Decisions (Approved by Consensus)

• There is no need to specify a certain number of topic areas.
• Users can enter through any topic area as a "door" into the Healthy People 2020 relational database.
• It is not necessary to use a matrix to communicate about how objectives relate across topic areas.

Next Steps

• Differentiate between core indicators and priority objectives and define how they should be set.
• Determine if there should be a subset of objectives with targets that relate to priority objectives.

I.  Welcoming Remarks

RADM Penelope Slade-Sawyer, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health and Director for Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), welcomed the members of the Secretary's Advisory Committee for National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2020 (the Advisory Committee), as well as the public. She provided an update on HHS plans for developing specific Healthy People 2020 objectives and the timeline for their release.

RADM Slade-Sawyer explained that the Federal Interagency Workgroup (FIW) recently recommended including "developmental objectives" (i.e., those lacking a data source) in Healthy People 2020. These objectives would be included to identify areas of emerging importance, and to drive development of data systems that measure them. Such inclusion should be predicated on a commitment from the agency that is sponsoring the objective to identify and fund a reliable data source, and to secure baseline data to permit setting a target for the year 2020. Because health equity and the elimination of health disparities are goals of Healthy People 2020, the FIW also recommended expanding the standard data table that was used to display the baseline status of specific population groups for populdation-based objectives in Healthy People 2010.

The Federal Workgroup Coordinators were submitting to the FIW proposals for specific Healthy People 2020 objectives, which had been prepared using the selection criteria developed by this Committee and the FIW. The FIW wouldd review the proposed objectives during the spring and summer of 2009. In October and November of 2009, HHS would make the draft objectives available for public comment through regional meetings and an interactive Web site.