Measuring health confidence to assess the impact of social health interventions in health care: Lessons from primary care teams

Issue: There are no common standards for measuring the effectiveness of social health interventions, which include helping people navigate essential resources and making referrals to social service providers. Emerging research suggests that addressing people’s essential resource needs may increase their confidence in managing their own health. 

Goals: To examine the value of using a patient-reported health confidence measure to monitor and improve efforts to address essential resource needs in primary care settings. 

Methods: Experiences in using the health confidence measure and data from primary care teams who participated in an 18-month learning collaborative. 

Key Findings: Measuring and reporting on patients’ health confidence was difficult for all primary care teams in the collaborative. For some teams, there was a strong association between social health interventions and increased access to essential resources and greater health confidence. This association was not observed for caregivers of pediatric patients, who reported higher levels of confidence managing the health of pediatric patients at baseline. Changes in levels of health confidence and in access to essential resources were not strongly associated. 

Conclusion: Levels of health confidence increased for some patients receiving social health interventions. We need a deeper understanding of how self-reported health confidence changes over time for patients receiving social support in primary care settings.