Last year, I had the opportunity to take part in “Designing Evaluations For What Communities Value,” a meeting organized by the Institute of Medicine’s Collaborative on Global Chronic Disease along with Thicket Advisor Pritpal S Tamber. The meeting brought together people trying to think differently about community-driven health programs. Our key questions were: How do we improve programs in ways that are aligned with what a unique community strives for? How do we understand how communities view health and wellness in the first place?

As Editorial Director for Medicine for the BMJ and as Physician Editor in the editorial team for TEDMED 2013, Pritpal has closely tracked clinical evidence and healthcare innovation for many years. Based on his experience, Pritpal founded the Creating Health Collaborative to understand why, despite their potential, broader definitions of health remain only a fringe of health innovation. And today, the Creating Health Collaborative is proposing a new way to define health as more than just the absence of disease, and as a way for people to take a growth mindset approach towards their health.

This year, Pritpal, along with Leigh Carroll and Bridget Kelly, have once again brought together a cross-section of community health professionals and evaluation practitioners, this time in a public forum. The Communities Creating Health series is being featured in the Stanford Social innovation Review over the next few weeks, and I'm pleased to share Thicket's contribution: "Emerging Tools for Community-Driven Evaluations." The piece features eight tools that can prove useful in this emerging space and covers a range of approaches derived from design thinking, community organizing, and systems analysis.

New articles in the series are published twice a week, and you can access the full Communities Creating Health series here. Read more of Pritpal's thinking in Community, Movements, and Spread: It’s the Process That Matters.