Director's Message

Welcome to the Evaluation Program at the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics.

We are a new program serving the Northwestern community and community partners with a wide range of evaluation services. Evaluation has the ability to truly transform departments, programs, projects, and research efforts through collection and careful, thoughtful review of data for decision making. I believe everyone's projects, programs and efforts can benefit from evaluation thinking.

Whenever I meet with a new researcher or program I ask them the same questions:

• What is it you want to know?
• What are you hoping to achieve (with your program/project)? What do you want to happen? What does success mean/look like?
• What, if you knew it, would allow you to do your work better and better reach your goals?

So often we can get caught up in what we have always done or what a funder wants done that we can miss the important piece of identifying what we want done and what will be useful to us. This is true in program planning, quality improvement and in research. Taking the time to think through an evaluation approach that will allow your efforts to thrive helps lay the groundwork for success. This is the true power of an evaluation mind set.

Our team is excited to bring our expertise and the power of evaluation to help strengthen your efforts. My goal for the evaluation program is to instill a culture of evaluation in the Buehler Center, Northwestern University, and our partners throughout Chicago and beyond. Please visit the rest of our website to see the services we provide and contact me at 312-503-1706 or sarah.welch@northwestern.edu for an evaluation consultation. I look forward to working with you.