ICH has been selected by Mass General Brigham (MGB) to evaluate the Community Health Impact Funds (CHIF), a significant investment in Boston and surrounding communities in Suffolk County. In 2022, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) began construction on a state-of-the-art clinical building in Boston—the Phillip and Susan Ragon Building. This capital expenditure triggered the largest ever Determination of Need (DoN) process in Massachusetts history, resulting in a $62M investment in the communities that MGH serves. The MGH Community Advisory Board (CAB), guided by the community-driven 2022-23 Community Health Needs Assessment and Community Health Implementation Plan, determined four funding priorities along with the strategies to tackle them—housing, economic/financial stability and mobility, mental/behavioral health, and food/nutrition security. Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital (BWFH) also embarked on a campus expansion building project, which is funding $4.9 million in community health programming in its catchment area, and the BWFH CAB selected mental/behavioral health as the priority area for this funding. ICH is conducting a process evaluation of the CHIF grant funding for both hospitals, along with in-depth program evaluations of grants in each funding priority area.

ICH’s evaluation includes four main components:

• Process evaluation: ICH is evaluating equity and effectiveness of the CHIF funding process to develop recommendations for future grant-making cycles.
• CHIF-wide evaluation planning and implementation: ICH has designed and is implementing an initiative-wide evaluation, with shared performance measures and outcome indicators that will supplement grantees’ individual evaluation plans. This will allow us to understand the broader impact of the overall funding within and across priority areas.
  Technical assistance for individual project evaluations: The ICH team is supporting grantees across all priorities and strategies to develop individual program logic models and corresponding evaluation plans, and to gather and report data on key indicators that will be customized to each program’s goals and context. The grantee-specific reporting will allow us to understand the nuances of each grantee’s progress and local outcomes, and will complement the CHIF-wide evaluation.
• Targeted evaluation projects: ICH will conduct in-depth case studies of selected grants and other special evaluation projects on emerging topics that are of current interest to MGB and the CHIF grantees.
• Process evaluation: ICH is evaluating equity and effectiveness of the CHIF funding process to develop recommendations for future grant-making cycles.
• CHIF-wide evaluation planning and implementation: ICH has designed and is implementing an initiative-wide evaluation, with shared performance measures and outcome indicators that will supplement grantees’ individual evaluation plans. This will allow us to understand the broader impact of the overall funding within and across priority areas.
• Technical assistance for individual project evaluations: The ICH team is supporting grantees across all priorities and strategies to develop individual program logic models and corresponding evaluation plans, and to gather and report data on key indicators that will be customized to each program’s goals and context. The grantee-specific reporting will allow us to understand the nuances of each grantee’s progress and local outcomes, and will complement the CHIF-wide evaluation.
• Targeted evaluation projects: ICH will conduct in-depth case studies of selected grants and other special evaluation projects on emerging topics that are of current interest to MGB and the CHIF grantees.

Based on the findings from each component of the evaluation, ICH will design products to disseminate results and recommendations to a variety of audiences and interest holders such as grantees and their local partners, intended beneficiary communities, MGB and other hospitals, and funders/grant-makers.