Hi, friend! I understand that effective primary care can improve health and cost outcomes, and patient, clinician, and staff experience, and evaluations can help determine how best to improve primary care to achieve these goals. Still, I find it difficult to “sale” the evaluation ideas within the primary care setting. Could you please kindly help me with it.

No worries.

I see. Thanks.

Not every intervention needs to be evaluated. Interventions that are minor or inexpensive, have a solid evidence base, or are part of quality improvement efforts may not warrant an evaluation. But many interventions would benefit from the study. To decide whether to conduct an evaluation, it’s important to identify the specific decisions the evaluation is expected to inform and to consider the cost of carrying out the evaluation. An evaluation is useful for interventions that are substantial and expensive and lack a solid evidence base. It can answer key questions about whether and how an intervention affected the ways practices deliver care and how changes in care delivery, in turn, affected outcomes. Feedback on the implementation of the model and early indicators of success can help refine the intervention. Evaluation findings can also help guide rollout to other practices. One key question to consider: Can the evaluation that you have the resources to conduct generate reliable and valid findings? Biased estimates of program impacts would mislead stakeholders and, I contend, could be worse than having no results at all.