Local data for local decision making--selected counties, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, 1997.

Although the delivery of clinical preventive services to adults, such as adult vaccinations and cancer and cardiovascular screening, reduces premature morbidity and mortality, such services are underused. Performance monitoring at the population level plays a critical role in supporting efforts to increase the use of clinical preventive services. However, many communities do not have the capacity to measure prevention activities. Without such information, efforts aimed at improving the county-wide or regional use of clinical preventive services must rely on state or national data. To examine the use of seven clinical preventive services among adults at the county level and to demonstrate how a population-based survey can be used to guide local prevention efforts, a community-based coalition (the Sickness Prevention Achieved through Regional Collaboration [SPARC]), in collaboration with state health departments, peer review organizations, and CDC, conducted a survey in the four-county SPARC region. This report summarizes the results of this analysis, which indicate that clinical preventive services in this region were underused despite high levels of access to medical care.