The USC Roybal Institute on Aging is embarking on a Los Angeles-focused project to develop a comprehensive population health scorecard.

The scorecard approach is not new. However, the specific population health information needs for the Healthy Aging Initiative are not met by existing county-level, state or national level reports.

The goal is to create an inventory of existing and potential evidence-based interventions to promote healthy aging in Los Angeles County in order to accurately assess need, fill program gaps, and develop a robust model of integrated primary, secondary, and tertiary aging services for local residents.

SC CTSI supported the planning meeting in the form of a Team Building Incubator Grant. The Roybal Institute is collaborating with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and Department of Health Services, the regional agency on aging, and faculty from USC as well as the UCLA School of Medicine and School of Public Health.

The meeting allowed the project collaborators to develop and prioritize the relevant scorecard measures and data sources and foster the partnerships required to supply data and identify end user needs and products.

“This support is of tremendous help,” said William Vega, Director of the Roybal Institute. “We had a lively, thoughtful discussion that has given us great momentum to move forward.”

While those statistics, along with the rich data provided by the Healthy People 2020 program, are informative benchmarks, they do not offer guidance for targeted local interventions for healthy aging. A second limitation of the existing reports, such as Seniors Count produced a few years ago by the City and County of Los Angeles Departments of Aging, is the lack of an explicit underlying conceptual model.

In line with national efforts by the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) network, the project will also contribute to identifying promising metrics for clinical and translational research processes and outcomes.