Prevention is Powerful
This week, we’re wrapping up our month-long series on our values here at AscentHealth Consulting. In previous weeks, we’ve discussed our first value: Research is the basis for all good decision making and strategy (See post). And our second value: Every community is unique and has opportunities to become a much healthier place [See post].
Prevention is a core value at AscentHealth. Photo by Taber Andrew Bain
Now it’s time to dive a little deeper into our third value: Prevention is the most powerful concept for improving community health.
We’ve seen it time and time again — preventing health problems is much less expensive than trying to play catch up later on. Matt Richardson, Ph.D., AscentHealth president, has spent most of his career establishing and implementing prevention programs in various cities, and I’ve spent much of the last decade working to prevent smoking in children, teens and adults. From my experience in tobacco prevention, I’ve learned it’s always easier to prevent bad habits than get people to quit them.
Our goal for every community health needs assessment we complete is to empower organizations, hospitals and communities to find the best means of preventing dangerous health habits so they can grow healthier, more sustainable communities for decades to come.
We hope this series about our values has helped you get to know our company a little better. If you’ve decided we might be a good partner for your Community Health Needs Assessment, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help you with a plan that’s right for your organization.
Lear MoreEvery Community IS Unique
![Your community is like no other and has innumerable opportunities to improve the health of its residents. Image by Mattinbgn (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://ascenthealthconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Dunedin_Suburbs.jpg)
Your community is like no other and has innumerable opportunities to improve the health of its residents.
Image by Mattinbgn (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
1. Research is the basis for all good decision making and strategy.
2. Every community is unique and has opportunities to become a much healthier place.
3. Prevention is the most powerful concept for improving community health.
Last week, we covered our first value, that research is the basis for all good decision making and strategy. If you’re curious about that post, check it out here. This week, we’re going to focus on our second core value, that every community is unique and has opportunities to become a much healthier place.
First, every community really IS unique. You can paint the whole U.S. with a few broad strokes when it comes to healthcare needs – obesity is a problem, diabetes is a problem, cardiovascular disease is a problem. But each community experiences these issues and many others in varying degrees and the infrastructure to address the many issues also can vary widely.
Community health needs assessment templates aren’t always the answer. To perform a community health needs assessment (CHNA) that meets the requirements set by the IRS (for nonprofit hospitals) and truly makes a difference in how you spend your money and how you impact the health of your community, you have to take an in-depth look at the community and see what its specific needs are. This process is best guided by those who have broad experience and a passion for this work.
Every community can become much healthier, but it’s important to identify the best strategy for improvement based on a CHNA that asks the right questions and brings you the best data. A comprehensive CHNA can help you identify those areas that are unique to your community and target the specific needs with services and education, ultimately making your community a healthier place for all.
Unique communities deserve unique assessments and unique strategies. Contact us to start your path toward a CHNA tailored to your community today.
Lear MoreThe 3 Values We Share
One of our shared values is that every community is unique. Photo by Duane Brown
Many people know how important AscentHealth Consulting is to Matt and me, but we often get asked why community health needs assessments (CHNAs) are such an important part of the puzzle of improving community health. We founded AscentHealth and chose to focus our business around community health needs assessments for nonprofit hospitals, community health foundations, public health departments and other nonprofits because we share three main values:
1. Research is the basis for all good decision making and strategy.
2. Every community is unique and has opportunities to become a much healthier place.
3. Prevention is the most powerful concept for improving community health.
For the next month, we plan to devote a blog post to covering each of these values and explain how they work together to make communities healthier and stronger. Stick around while we discuss the power of research and data to inform strategic decisions around improving the health of a community. By the end of this series, we hope you’ll know a little more about us and how our philosophy toward community health needs assessments can give your organization what it needs to empower your community.
If you have questions along the way, please don’t hesitate to share them with us. We would love to expand upon or clarify anything we’ve said, so please reach out.
-Mary
Garden as Metaphor: Everything’s Bigger in Texas
Improving the health of a community is much like tending a garden with very long rows of corn.
Thanks to Farmacy for this image.
Part I – Garden as Metaphor Series …
Growing things fascinates me. Put a seed in the ground, give it a little water, a little sun and voila! You (usually) get a plant that offers great value – well beyond the small seed that was planted.
Being raised on a farm let me see this process in an up close and personal way. Our family’s annual income was tied to my father’s seasonal efforts of planting, tending and harvesting.
One summer, he and my mother decided that my sister and I could benefit from caring for a garden. In typical “Everything’s Bigger in Texas” fashion, my dad helped out by planting the corn with his tractor. It didn’t take very long in his enormous tractor to plant 18 rows of corn that were each about ¼-mile long.
So far, so good. Until my sister and I discovered that every morning, we’d be expected to grab our hoes and weed those 18 rows, along with about six more rows of okra, cucumbers, watermelon and other produce.
It felt like child labor at the time, but looking back, that garden has proven to be a metaphor for almost every life event, every business challenge, every turn of fate.
Improving the health of a community is very much like tending a garden. In future blog posts, we’ll explore the whole process from planting to harvest as it applies to cultivating the health of your community. Stay tuned!
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.
Lear More
Puzzled About How the Pieces Go Together To Create a Healthy Community?
Image by Cory Doctorow of gruntzooki
Nonprofit hospitals, United Ways, community foundations and public health departments are just a few of the groups looking at what appears to be a 10,000-piece puzzle that must be solved before the true picture of a healthy community emerges. Many groups start with the straight-edge pieces – what everyone thinks are the obvious issues — but how do you know that’s the real place to start?
The answer, of course, is good data that’s community-specific. The kind of data gained through a Community Health Needs Assessment. The kind of data that has enough depth to suggest workable strategies and also which groups can implement those strategies.
We often hear people say, “My community is different.” Indeed, every community IS different. Let’s take a look at a few of the aspects that affect a community’s health in ways that may be different from other communities:
- Different cultures – Are faith-based organizations trusted sources of health information? Is education valued? Is there a culture of exercise or do people typically drive, rather than walk or ride bicycles?
- Different community organizations – Which organizations are well-managed and financially strong? Which are providing evidence-based programs? Which can provide the leadership for a community-wide initiative?
- Different barriers to healthy behaviors – Are there safe places to walk and exercise? Is fresh food readily available and affordable?
- Differing access to healthcare – Are neighborhood clinics located in low-income neighborhoods? Are certain groups reluctant to visit healthcare providers? Is transportation an issue?
Many of the strategies for improving community health involve local leaders working together to make a difference. In any given community, this may be hospital leaders, public health officials, the United Way, community foundation boards, city officials, nonprofit organizations and other interested groups. There are many organizations and individuals in every community that have a sincere interest in seeing tangible improvements in the place they love and serve.
A high quality Community Health Needs Assessment will certainly highlight the issues a community should start to address, but it will also provide the evidence that points to workable strategies and help identify the groups that can carry out the work.
All these moving parts may seem like that 10,000-piece puzzle. But the puzzle’s picture begins to emerge with information from your Community Health Needs Assessment.
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.
Lear More5 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
Lear More
The “Why” of Community Health Needs Assessments
To understand, begin with the “Why.”
Photo by: I, Nikopoley
If you spend much time in healthcare these days, you will surely hear the term Community Health Needs Assessment, or simply Community Health Assessment.
Hospitals, public health departments, community foundations and a variety of nonprofit organizations serving healthcare needs are keenly interested in better understanding the root causes of poor health, the services currently provided in their communities, the gaps in healthcare service and where their entity can best fill needs.
You may have noticed in your community that several organizations are on a mission to understand how the complex parts of the healthcare system can work together more effectively.
What you may not know is why.
First, the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has added a new IRS regulation that requires nonprofit hospitals to conduct a Community Health Needs Assessment every three years and to develop plans based on the data from those assessments.
Second, the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) asks health departments that are going through the accreditation process to participate in or lead a collaborative effort to produce a comprehensive Community Health Assessment. Once the assessment is complete, the PHAB standards require that health departments create a “community health improvement plan” with a rigorous evaluation process.
Third, best practices for today’s leading nonprofit organizations require them to be data driven. The days of using intuition and anecdotes to determine what social service needs to fill and how to fill them are past. Funders of nonprofit activity expect to see proof of the need and then see proof that the need is being met.
As all these forces converge, the great hope is that the health of communities across America benefit from the collaborations that bring the strengths of hospitals, public health departments and nonprofits organizations of all types together.
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
Lear MoreIn the Beginning…
For months it had been rolling around in our heads. My concept was a fuzzy notion; Matt’s was a real concept and one that is set to fill a pressing need.
You see, I had this idea that the timing was right to put my affinity for healthcare, communications and community building to work to help improve the health of communities during this time when preventive health seemed to be coming of age. And so it hit me – I had to talk to Matt Richardson, the most savvy public health expert I knew.
Over lunch, Matt listened politely while I went on about the nation’s obvious need to find big strategies that affect the health of large numbers of people. (Not news to him, of course.) Then I asked: Where do you see an opportunity where I can make a difference?
Matt smiled and said, “I’ve been thinking about this idea…”
He went on to tell me his vision of conducting Community Health Needs Assessments to help nonprofit hospitals and other nonprofit organizations have a solid foundation of research specific to their communities.
Right away, I saw how valuable it would be to these organizations to have someone with Matt’s expertise interpret the data in ways that would guide the implementation of effective plans, creating outcomes that would be life-changing for members of those communities.
While there are several organizations who will do six-figure needs assessments, our company – AscentHealth Consulting – specializes in more affordable assessments, while offering a high quality product.
It’s work that both Matt and I are sincerely enthusiastic about because we’ve seen the power of communities that bring people together to solve big problems. Solving the challenges of chronic diseases and creating a culture of wellness will be achieved by committed people armed with a foundation of solid data and a strategic plan driven by measurable results.
In the years to come, we at AscentHealth hope to be part of making many communities healthier.
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
Lear More