Systematic Review of Implementation Measures Used in Health Policy Studies

Measuring Health Policy Implementation

Government-mandated policies have led to dramatic improvements in population health, and public policy has tremendous potential to stimulate future improvements.

Theoretical frameworks and policy research historically emphasized policy development, with less attention on how best to implement policies and measure their impact. Since the 1970s, policy implementation research has generally relied on labor-intensive qualitative interview studies and mixed methods studies to identify barriers and facilitators or monitor and improve implementation. Numerous researchers have independently developed quantitative measures, such as surveys or archival checklists, to assess implementation of specific policies, but there have been limited efforts to synthesize and share measures that can be used across diverse policy settings. 

About the Site

This website is intended to help policy researchers, evaluators, and implementation science researchers identify and select measures to assess the implementation of health policies in a variety of settings (e.g., hospitals, outpatient clinics, neighborhoods, schools). Our team conducted a systematic review of studies of government-mandated health policy implementation published between January 1995 and April 2019.

On this site you can interactively search for measures by several attributes and see and download measure overviews that include ratings of the measures’ pragmatic and psychometric properties. (See the About page for more information about our review.)

How to Use This Site

Learn more about how to search by measure attributes.

Find Measures

Learn more about the measures included in our review.