Evaluating health initiatives is crucial to determining their effectiveness, efficiency, and impact on public health. The evaluation process generally involves several key steps and considerations:

• Define objectives and scope.
• Develop Logic Model or Theory of Change.
• Establish evaluation criteria and indicators.
• Selecting evaluation methods.
• Data collection.
• Data analysis.
• Interpretation of Results.
• Reporting and Dissemination.
• Ethical Considerations.
• Why Canada needs to adopt a Health in All Policies (HiAP) framework.
• Addressing the social determinants of health and reducing health inequities.
• Engaging the public and community.

Artificial Intelligence is braced to have a dramatic and profound impact on policy making—the ability to sense patterns of need, develop evidence-based programs, forecast outcomes, and analyze effectiveness. AI could advance the evaluation stage of the policy cycle by providing faster and more accurate data that can assess the impact of policies.

• Leveraging digital tools to collect and analyze data for evaluating policies in real-time or near real-time.
• AI and the policymaking cycle.
• Using AI and technology in evaluation practices.
• AI and evaluation.
• AI and the Government of the Future.

A rights-based approach ensures that policy evaluations not only measure effectiveness in terms of outcomes but also assess the policy’s adherence to human rights standards, promoting a more just and equitable society. A human rights-based approach causes policy makers to think about marginalized individuals up front, integrating human rights principles and standards into the evaluation process. Key elements and steps include:

• The human rights framework.
• Identification of rights holders and responsible entities.
• Define objectives from a rights perspective.
• Human rights goals and impacts on rights.
• Participatory evaluation.
• Select human rights indicators and relevant disaggregation of data.
• Data collection and analysis.
• Evaluate impact on human rights.

Departments often share program objectives, but are seldom evaluated together. Such evaluations can be useful to assess the effectiveness of a suite of programs against Government priorities. This session will discuss the horizontal evaluation of innovation and clean tech programs in the federal government, including:

• Strategic policy context.
• Leadership approach.
• Management dynamics.
• Methodologies.
• Findings – Best Practices in Federal Business Innovation Program Delivery.
• Lessons Learned.

Strengthening organizations’ capacity to commission, conduct, and use high-quality evaluations requires intentional action on the part of evaluators. In this session, attendees will be introduced to:

• A process that can be used to create a strategy for strengthening existing evaluation capacity in organizations.
• Key outcomes of evaluation capacity strategies.
• Common approaches for measuring and enhancing evaluation capacity.
• Attendees will also learn about potential ways to continue enhancing their own competencies to support evaluation capacity efforts.

Learn how network metrics can provide innovative, systems-based approaches to understanding and improving policy-making processes. Topics will include:

• Network metrics as tools to map relationships between stakeholders, organizations, and institutions involved in policy-making.
• Common metrics revealing insights into influence, communication patterns and power dynamics within networks.
• Case studies applying network metrics in policy context.
• How network analysis can offer evidence-based insights that lead to more effective policy development
• Challenges and opportunities
• Future of network metrics in policy evaluation: