Achieving Population Health Impacts Through Health Promotion Programs Offered by Community-based Organizations

Evidence-based health promotion programs can help older adults manage chronic conditions and address behavioral risk factors, and translating these interventions to population-scale impact depends on reaching people outside of clinical settings. Area Agencies on Aging (AAAs) have emerged as important delivery sites for health promotion programs, but the impacts of their expanded role in delivering these interventions remain unknown.

The objective of this study was to test whether evidence-based health promotion programs implemented by AAAs from 2008 to 2016 influenced health care use and spending by older adults and to examine how agencies' organizational capacity for implementation influenced these population-level impacts.

We used panel regression models to examine how the expansion of health promotion programs offered by AAAs over the course of 2008-2016 was associated with a change in health care use and spending by older adults in counties served by the AAAs. We examined impact separately for high capacity and low capacity agencies.

Across the full sample of AAAs, beginning to offer any health promotion program in the AAA was associated a with 0.94% percentage point reduction in potentially avoidable nursing home use in counties covered by the AAA (95% confidence interval=-1.58, -0.29), equivalent to a 6.5% change. Expanding the breadth of programs offered by the AAA was also associated with a significant reduction in potentially avoidable nursing home use. Stratified analysis showed that reductions in potentially avoidable nursing home use were evident only in places where the AAA had high implementation capacity. Expansion of health promotion programs offered by AAAs was not associated with the change in county-level hospital readmission rates, ambulatory care sensitive hospitalizations, or Medicare spending per beneficiary.

AAAs are an example of community-based organizations that can contribute to health care policy goals such as cost containment. Organizational development support may be needed to extend their ability to effect change in more regions of the country.