Healthcare Strategic Growth Blog

Advice from the Experts on How to Successfully Complete Your CHNA

By Lee Ann Lambdin 

2022 will be a big year for Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs). With the requirement that they are conducted every three years, this is the year for many hospitals to undergo a systematic collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about the health of their community.

With that in mind, we thought it would be helpful to gather some of the brightest minds we know, experts on how to successfully conduct a CHNA. As Stratasan’s SVP of Healthcare Strategy, and someone who has more than 10 years of experience working with CHNAs, I hosted the session alongside Dr. Stephanie Bailey, Amanda Ables, and Carol Quest. You can read full bios for each of our panelists at the end of this post. 

We considered this session to be a support group for those completing CHNAs this year or even next year. It was an opportunity to hear from a panel of experts who've been there and struggled and come out the other side successful.

We recorded this session, and you can listen to it here. Below, you’ll find a transcript from this discussion, so you can reference the valuable insights shared by our panel in the weeks and months to come as you complete your next CHNA.

Put Your CHNA to Work to Address these Issues 

By Lee Ann Lambdin

Over the past several years, Stratasan’s Strategic Advisory Services team has completed more than 75 CHNAs. This work is done side by side with a hospital and their community in an effort to assess the health of the community and develop a plan for addressing top health concerns. Over time we’ve noted trends in common health concerns and how community involvement is so important to make the changes needed to correct these issues. In this post, we’ll discuss these findings in more detail.

Execute Your CHNA and Improve Community Health

By Lee Ann Lambdin

One sentence in the Federal Register requirement for CHNAs (page 19, section 6, paragraph E) calls for “a description of the resources potentially available to address the significant health needs identified through the CHNA.” While this one line may seem innocuous at face value, after 9 years of performing CHNAs, I’ve seen this one little sentence take on significant importance in improving the health of communities.

Initially, this requirement was seen as just that, a requirement. However, communities are now seeing how little cross-communication of community resources takes place and how critical this communication is to providing valuable health resources to their residents. Hospitals and communities are beginning to use the Community Asset Inventory as an online catalog for community members who need access to practical, helpful health resources.

Performing a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) is more than just a practice required by law for certain hospitals. When executed well, it can also dramatically further publicity and marketing initiatives, supporting your annual planning process and enhancing the execution of your strategic growth goals.

CHNAs provide so much beneficial information that one of the nation’s largest for-profit hospitals has brought on Stratasan to execute 17 CHNAs on their behalf. These CHNAs will benefit their community outreach and population health initiatives.