Best Practices for Addressing Your Community Health Needs Assessment

The intent of the community health needs assessment (CHNA) mandate is to compel hospitals to take a collaborative approach to addressing the health needs of their communities. Based on the findings of the CHNA, the hospitals must create and deploy an implementation plan, referred to as a community health improvement plan (CHIP), to address each identified need.

The CHNA process requires key tasks in order to meet the terms of the mandate:

• Organize a CHNA work group that includes key community representatives ^[1]
• Conduct a qualitative analysis
• Complete a quantitative analysis
• Identify and prioritize key community health needs
• Determine responses to identified needs
• Craft a collaborative implementation plan
• Gain board approval for the CHNA and the implementation plan
• Publicly post the CHNA and CHIP on the hospital Web site

From the initiation of the work group to final board approval, the process requires in-depth planning, analysis, and execution. Community members must play an active role in the process, both in work group participation and partnership in achieving the implementation plan.

The qualitative analysis is externally focused to uncover the perceptions of residents, local organizations, and key leaders. This can be accomplished through a combination of town-hall-style meetings, panel discussions, and written or telephone surveys. As part of the quantitative analysis, hospitals must thoroughly collect and analyze data from a variety of sources, including healthcare market databases and local, regional, and national population and community health databases. The analytics should go beyond a traditional market analysis to include an understanding of demand for all resources considered to be under the comprehensive community “health” umbrella.

Such statistics may include:

• Use of public transportation
• Number of child care facilities
• Rates of childhood immunizations
• Access to grocery stores
• Prevalence of single parenting
• Rates of homelessness

The data-driven assessment of comprehensive community needs informs the development of a CHIP, which outlines and prioritizes the key community health initiatives to be collaboratively pursued over the next 3 years. Because CHIP implementation responsibility is distributed among collaborating organizations, hospitals serve not just as providers of care, but as organizers of care efforts intended to improve overall health inside and outside the walls of hospitals – a new perspective on the pursuit of mission-driven healthcare.

If you’d like to learn how to maximize your investment in CHNA now, read the full article.

Published June 27, 2013