Background: The effectiveness of health promotion campaigns is hard to measure due to complex outcome and external factors. This study presents a method to evaluate a mass women's health promotion campaign held in a large health maintenance organization (HMO) in Israel.
Methods: This population-based study used administrative and medical databases to examine whether postal invitation to 120,231 HMO-female members increased adherence with certain preventive medicine recommendations (LDL-C, bone density test, and mammography breast cancer screening). A comparison was made using three different reference data: pre- and post-campaign periods (1998-2003), HMO-male members who were not targeted by the campaign, and rates of urine tests, which were also not targeted by the campaign.
Results: During the 2 months following the campaign, adherence with mammography (3.8%) and LDL-C (12.5%) reached their maximum rates in 5 years. Adherence with bone density test increased from 2.3% in 2000 to 2.8% in the campaign period. No similar trends were observed for urine or LDL-C tests among men.
Conclusions: The use of multiple reference groups through the analysis of administrative and medical databases supports the association between the campaign and improved adherence with screening tests. A similar methodology may be adopted for the analysis of mass health promotion campaigns in large HMOs.