Measuring Success: Disease Intervention Specialists Performance Metrics and Outcome Assessments

Disease intervention specialists (DIS) are the cornerstone of public health. However, the incremental gains of DIS-led interventions are difficult to detect at the population level. Health departments attempt to quantify the impact of key DIS activities through performance measures that assess how many and how quickly both patients are interviewed, and contacts are notified, tested, and treated. However, DIS work encompasses more than case finding and existing performance measures may not capture the full value DIS provide to health departments. In this article, we first describe how DIS investigations and contact tracing are conducted for sexually transmitted diseases and other communicable diseases to understand how the definition of effectiveness may vary by disease. Then, we examine the benefits and limitations of traditional performance measures using syphilis investigations as an example. Recognizing the limits of existing measures will improve our understanding of DIS impact and assist in the development of new measures of effectiveness that better represent the totality of DIS work.