A three-year initiative, the Rural Health Research Gateway involves four key activities. All activities for the project focus on a particular portion of the diverse audience; during year 1 the national audience, year 2 the state audience and year 3 the community audience.
Needs Study: During each year, an issue group with key representatives of the diverse audience are convened in order to discuss how they access rural health research information, what dissemination products and approaches are most useful and how current dissemination could be more effective.
Dissemination toolkit: During each year, a dissemination toolkit will be produced using results from the Needs study for the targeted diverse audience. The toolkit includes a comprehensive web site with a searchable database, a comprehensive flyer describing all eight Rural Health Research Centers and information about useful approaches for a wide range of products including working papers, fact sheets, policy briefs, press releases, brochures and web sites.
Impact Study: The impact of the dissemination approaches will be studied through five mechanisms: 1) assessing the reaction of members of the diverse target audience, 2) assessing the usefulness of the new dissemination products to the diverse target audience 3) determining the frequency that particular dissemination products are accessed and 4) determine the frequency that research findings that are disseminated are cited in multiple media sources such as press, and 5) determining impact by examining changes in government programs and policies. The results of the Impact study will be used to modify the dissemination toolkit.
Evaluation: A logic model will be used for the evaluation of the overall project and includes the collection of process measurements to examine whether the project is progressing as proposed and outcome measurements to determine the impact of each of the activities.
