Network Strategy
A community health needs assessment in days, not months
A community health coordinator at a 40-bed nonprofit hospital
A small nonprofit hospital gathers the data for its required three-year community health needs assessment in two weeks, not the usual four to six months. It also skips the consultant's fee.
The requirement
To keep their tax exemption, nonprofit hospitals must publish a community health needs assessment every three years. For a small hospital, gathering the data is most of the work.
The work
On Network Strategy, the coordinator picks the hospital's service area:
- Needs assessment. The health picture compared with the state: diabetes, heart disease, mental health and preventive care.
- Community surveys. What residents say about their own health and how hard it is to get care.
- Health centers and Diabetes prevention. What help already exists, and where it's missing.
- Priorities and plan. The gaps as a ranked list the hospital's committee can vote on.
The decision
The committee picks three priorities: diabetes, access to behavioral health care, and transportation to care. Each one comes with the data behind it.
Why it matters
Staff time goes into talking with the community and writing the plan, not into gathering spreadsheets.
See it with real data: the free Polk County, Iowa sample, or what's inside each desk. Every plan starts with a 7-day trial.
The people, places and numbers in these stories are made up to show how the pages work. The pages and the public data behind them are real.
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