Community Engagement in Academic Health Centers: A Model for Capturing and Advancing Our Successes

Academic health centers (AHCs) are under increased pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness of their community-engaged activities, but there are no common metrics for evaluating community engagement in AHCs. Eight AHCs piloted the Institutional Community Engagement Self-Assessment (ICESA), a two-phase project to assess community-engagement efforts. The first phase uses a framework developed by the University of Rochester Medical Center, which utilizes structure, process, and outcome criteria to map CE activities. The second phase uses the Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH) Self-Assessment to identify institutional resources for community engagement, and potential gaps, to inform community engagement goal-setting. The authors conducted a structured, directed content analysis to determine the effectiveness of using the two-phase process at the participating AHCs. The findings suggest that the ICESA project assisted AHCs in three key areas, and may provide a strategy for assessing community engagement in AHCs.