Developing a Public Health Quality Tool for Mobile Health Clinics to Assess and Improve Care

This report describes the development and deployment of the Public Health Quality Tool, an online resource designed to help mobile health clinics (MHCs) assess and improve the quality of their public health services. MHCs provide essential clinical and public health services to underserved populations but have historically lacked tools to assess and improve the quality of their work. To address this gap, the Public Health Quality Tool (PHQTool) was developed as an online, evidence-based, self-assessment resource for MHCs, hosted on the Mobile Health Map (MHMap) platform. Drawing from national public health frameworks and Honore et al.’s nine quality aims, the PHQTool focuses on six aims most relevant to mobile care: Equitable, Health Promoting, Proactive, Transparent, Effective, and Efficient. Development included expert consultation, pilot testing, and iterative refinement informed by user feedback. The tool allows clinics to evaluate practices, identify improvement goals, and track progress over time. Since implementation, 82 MHCs representing diverse organizational types have used the PHQTool, reporting high usability and identifying common improvement areas such as outreach, efficiency, and equity-driven service delivery. The PHQTool facilitates systematic quality assessment within the mobile clinic sector and supports consistent documentation of public health efforts. By providing a standardized, accessible framework for evaluation, it contributes to broader efforts to strengthen evidence-based quality improvement and promote accountability in MHCs.