The PHAB Standards & Measures are organized into 12 domains. The domains are based on the original 10 Essential Public Health Services, plus administration and management and the health department’s relationship with its governing entity. For initial accreditation, each domain has one or more standard and each standard has one or more measure. There are approximately 100 measures. For reaccreditation, there are no standards and there approximately 30 measures.

Health departments’ conformity with each measure is assessed in a Site Visit Report, which is prepared by peer reviewers and forms the basis of the Accreditation Committee’s determination of accreditation status. For each measure in initial accreditation, the health department is assessed as Fully Demonstrated, Largely Demonstrated, Slightly Demonstrated, or Not Demonstrated. In reaccreditation, measures are assessed as either Met or Not Met.

The portal includes information from all health departments that have been reviewed by the Accreditation Committee (including health departments going through the action plan/ACAR and those that have received a status of Not Accredited). 

Interpreting the Measure Data

The following are important considerations in interpreting these findings:

• The assessments reflect how well, in the professional judgment of PHAB-trained volunteer reviewers, health departments’ documentation demonstrates conformity with the specific requirements in the Standards & Measures. Thus, it is important to consider those required elements of the measures when interpreting these findings. It is also possible that what may appear to be gaps in health department capacity may indicate an opportunity for the measure to be revised or clarified to better capture the underlying concept.
• The “report assessment data” provided in this portal are based on the assessments of conformity when the Site Visit Report is first reviewed by the Accreditation Committee. However, approximately 40% of health departments are required to complete an action plan/ACAR and demonstrate progress on these measures before they are accredited. As such, information on the initial assessment does not reflect the current capacity of accredited health departments. Instead, it reflects the areas in which health departments initially faced challenges.  
• Toggle to the “action plan data” tabs to see which measures health departments were required by the Accreditation Committee to address prior to becoming accreditation. This also shows the improvements that health departments made through this part of the process. “Improved” means that the documentation for that measure was assessed as Fully or Largely Demonstrated when site visitors reviewed the additional documentation that was provided through the action plan process. 
• These analyses are based on those health departments that have undergone the voluntary accreditation process. It does not include health departments that have not yet completed the peer review phase or have not yet applied. These findings may not be generalizable to other health departments that are not in the accreditation process or accredited by PHAB. 

Other Measure Notes

• If the user does not filter by Version, the portal will display aggregate information from across versions 1.0 and 1.5 of the Standards and Measures. If the user is looking at a specific measure and the requirement has undergone a substantive change, only Version 1.5 data will be displayed. 
• Users can select to see data about a particular measure or a group of measures (e.g., a domain, standard, or theme, such as health equity). When displaying a group of measures, the denominator is all the assessments within that group. For example, if a domain has 10 measures and there are 200 health departments in the filter, the denominator for that domain would be 2000. If the visualization indicates that 25% of measures were assessed as fully demonstrated, that means that across those 200 health departments and 10 measures, 500 assessments (out of a total of 2,000 assessments) were fully demonstrated. 
• Accredited health departments can also see an overall summary score, which is the percentage of the measures for which they were assessed as Fully Demonstrated or Largely Demonstrated. The comparative score is the percentage of times a measure was assessed as Fully or Largely Demonstrated across all the assessments for the health departments selected by the filters. 

For Researchers

The PHAB data portal provides an opportunity for researchers to do an initial exploration of PHAB data. If you would like to conduct a more in-depth research study, read about PHAB’s data use agreement and related policies here.