5 Ways a Community Health Needs Assessment Can Strengthen Your Hospital Marketing

If you work for a nonprofit hospital organization, you are no doubt aware of a section in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requiring your organization to conduct a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA).

There are a couple of ways to think about your CHNA: either as a compliance burden or as a valuable tool for strengthening connections to your market and positioning your organization for the future.

The CHNA gives your hospital organization a way to assess the broader community and its health needs, then prioritize those needs and determine how best to address them. Along the way, marketing opportunities abound.
Are you using your CHNA to strengthen your marketing? Here’s how:

1) Good marketing starts with good data. Done right, the CHNA provides a useful snapshot of your community and includes demographic, socioeconomic and financial data, as well as good qualitative data from the community stakeholders you bring into the process. Once you dig into the data, you will find useful insights that can also serve to inform your strategic marketing decisions.

2) A marketer’s job is to help the organization be outward turning. We all recognize that the fee-for-service model has required healthcare providers to focus narrowly on one patient at a time. A CHNA can get the attention of your decision-makers and help them better understand the priority health needs of the entire community they serve. This can help your organization be more nimble as it approaches future healthcare reform.

3) Build a tangible platform to discuss the health of the community. Starting with the announcement that you are conducting a CHNA, you will have many opportunities throughout the process to tell your marketplace how you are working to improve the health of your community. This platform will position your organization as a leader in addressing priority health needs.

4) Educate external stakeholders and agencies. As you build the relationships necessary to conduct and later implement your CHNA, you will also be educating others about your organization and inviting them into your world. The simple act of engaging others through a deeper mutual understanding can benefit your marketing efforts and pay dividends for years to come.

5) Collaborations extend your marketing reach. As you establish relationships with a wide array of community organizations to help you implement your CHNA, you are extending your organization’s mission, vision and marketing messages deeper into the community you serve. Collaborators can be your organization’s best friends.

Seize these marketing opportunities provided by your Community Health Needs Assessment and build on them to develop deeper relationships and understanding throughout your community.

If you are interested in discussing how a Community Health Needs Assessment and related planning activities can help your organization make a greater impact, please contact Mary Coyne at (806) 670-7440 or Mary@AscentHealthConsulting.com