Ideally, the best estimate for unduplicated clients to be served by the particular intervention should be reported. However, contacts are acceptable for outreach only. For all data collection by intervention, jurisdictions should do their best to collect unduplicated client counts.

CDC’s Guidance on HIV Prevention Community Planning (1998), calls for CPGs to prioritize populations at high risk for HIV and to prioritize culturally and linguistically appropriate interventions for them. Criteria to be considered in prioritizing interventions include outcome effectiveness; relative costs and effectiveness; sound scientific theory when outcome effectiveness information is lacking; and values, norms, and preferences of the communities for whom services are intended. The Guidance states, "At a minimum, the community planning groups must provide a clear, concise, logical statement as to why each population and intervention given high priority was chosen."

With this in mind, intervention plans that include populations and interventions based on the priorities set in the comprehensive HIV prevention plan will meet the requirements for "evidence or theory basis for the intervention." This is the very minimum criterion for asserting the evidence or theory basis for the intervention. However, the community planning process will most likely not go into enough detail to provide evidence to justify application to the target population AND setting. In order to assert justification for the target population and setting, CDC prefers that health departments request logic models or depictions of program theory from applicants and/or grantees that show the proposed relationship between the intervention and expected outcomes for the particular target population in a particular setting.

Health departments that have Requests for Proposals (e.g., requests for applications, invitations to negotiate, etc.) that ask applicants to specifically discuss the evidence or theory basis of proposed interventions as well as justification for application to the target population and setting will meet requirements for scientific evidence and justification. In addition, if the RFPs also ask applicants to specifically discuss factors relating to the sufficiency of the service delivery plan (e.g., provider training and supervision, quality assurance and accountability mechanisms), this, too, will meet the requirements for sufficiency of the service delivery plan.

If the criteria above are met, grantees should not be expected to submit additional information.

Chapter 3 of the Evaluation Guidance contains discussion of how to assess the intervention’s evidence basis and how to assess the intervention’s justification to the target population and setting. There is also discussion on how to determine the sufficiency of the service plan. More extensive discussion is found in Chapter 3 of Volume 2: Supplemental Handbook. CDC’s Guidance on community planning, referenced above, is another source of information on factors to consider in prioritizing interventions.

As noted above, the minimum bound of acceptability for scientific evidence is compliance with the CPG-approved priorities in the comprehensive prevention plan. However, the minimum bound of acceptability for justification is a logic model or program theory description that shows the relationship between the intervention and expected outcomes for the particular target population in a particular setting. If health department grantees were funded based on applications that provided a high quality discussion of the evidence or theory basis of interventions and justification to the target population in a particular setting, then those descriptions are acceptable.

The intervention plan data that health departments submit to CDC may be considered "benchmark" data for health departments and CBOs to use to set the stage for process evaluation; that is, understanding how and why process monitoring data differ from intervention plan data. If process monitoring data reveal that fewer (or even more) clients are being served than anticipated by intervention plan data or that different populations are being reached than those originally targeted, this is useful information to use to modify interventions to realistically meet client needs. This information should then be used to set more realistic plans for the next year.

If, for example, an intervention is dropped and another one added for a target population, this information should not be submitted to CDC. Health departments should not submit revised intervention plan data to CDC. Intervention plan data are to be submitted only once a year.

CDC recognizes that intervention plans change and a strict comparison of intervention plan and process monitoring data would often show major differences between the two sets of data.

As the Evaluation Guidance indicates, the "Notes/Comments Field" is an optional field health departments may use to provide explanation, clarification, or additional information about the data provided on the form. Health departments are not required to provide notes or comments.