International Journal for Quality Research 11(4) 817–834 ISSN 1800-6450 817 Susanta Kumar Gauri Prasun Das 1 Article info: Received 16.06.2017 Accepted 25.09.2017 UDC – 614:005.6 DOI – 10.18421/IJQR11.04-06 A FRAMEWORK FOR PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND MONITORING OF PUBLIC HEALTH PROGRAM USING COMPOSITE PERFORMANCE INDEX Abstract: A public health program (PHP) taken up by the government of a country refers to all organized measures to prevent disease and promote health among the population, by providing different planned cares/services to the people. Usually, the target population for different PHP are different. The basic requirement for success of a PHP is to ensure that all the planned cares/services are reached to each member of the target population. Therefore, the important performance measures for a PHP are the implementation status of all the planned cares/services under the PHP. However, management and monitoring of a PHP become quite difficult by interpreting separately the information contained in a large number of performance measures. Therefore, usually a metric, called composite performance index (CPI), is evaluated to understand the overall performance of a PHP. However, due a scaling operation involved in the CPI computation procedure, the CPI value does not reveal the true overall implementation status of a PHP and consequently, it is effective for management of a PHP. This paper presents a new approach for CPI computation, in which scaling/normalization of the performance variables is not required and therefore, it can be used for monitoring the true overall implementation status of a PHP in a region. A systematic approach for monitoring a PHP using the CPI values is proposed and applied for monitoring the maternal and child healthcare (MCH) program. The results are found effective towards continuous improvement of implementation status. Keywords: Composite performance index, Maternal and child healthcare, Monitoring implementation status, Performance measures, Public health program 1. Introduction 1 Public health program (PHP) refers to all organized measures to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong life among the population as a whole. Today, the government of each country takes up several 1 Corresponding author: Prasun Das email: dasprasun@rediffmail.com PHPs, through a broad range of people and organizations and agencies, with the aim to promote and protect the health of the nation and its communities. The common PHPs undertaken in different countries are disease prevention and health promotion in children, adolescents and pregnant women. Public programs of every stripe and size across the nation require appropriate performance measurements (indicators) for creating and carrying out activities to being accountable