The Administration on Aging (AoA) is sponsoring an initiative to develop and field-test a core set of performance measures for state and community programs on aging operating under Title III of the Older Americans Act (OAA). Entitled the Performance Outcomes Measures Project (POMP), this initiative helps States and Area Agencies on Aging address their own planning and performance reporting needs, while assisting AoA to meet the accountability provisions of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) and the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) program assessment requirements. OMB uses their Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to evaluate program performance. The collection of timely, accurate, and comparable data is of growing importance with GPRA, the advent of PART, and related state and local initiatives that link continued funding to demonstrated program benefits and outcomes.

Two distinct efforts are underway during the current year. They are referred to as Standard POMP and Advanced POMP. The purpose of Standard POMP is to continue developing and/or refining consumer assessment performance measurement tools and developing service provider surveys. Standard POMP will be focusing on two new performance measures indicators: recipient and providers surveys. The new effort, Advanced POMP, is a cooperative agreement with participating States for the purpose of designing a protocol for the development of more robust performance outcome measures quantifying program impact in a manner that can be associated with program cost.