Health needs assessment is a systematic method of identifying unmet health and healthcare needs of a population. It traditionally involves an epidemiological and qualitative methods to determining priorities. Most community health needs assessments stop at epidemiology—counting who has which diseases and what the community says are important to them. For instance, in California, in additional health concerns such as mental health or chronic diseases, frequently cited needs by the public as reported in county Community Health Needs Assessments include:
Many of these areas fall outside the domain of the public healthcare agency. For instance, concerns about access to care often refer to challenges with getting physicians to move to medically underserved areas and treat people who have Medi-Cal as their health insurance…an important issue, but not one that a public healthcare agency has the scope or resources to address. This creates a dilemma for public healthcare agencies: Do they restrict the reported needs to areas that they can address (i.e., are in their scope) or do they report the larger needs of the population.
At present, most traditional health needs assessments do neither. That is, they do not restrict themselves to just the needs they can address, but they also don’t provide a full report of the needs in their community.
For instance, knowing that 5,000 people have diabetes doesn't provide the full picture, including:
This is the type of information that a Comprehensive Community Health Needs Assessment (CCHNA) would provide: A full picture of the health needs and gaps in the local healthcare current system.
A CCHNA aligns with established health system performance assessment frameworks used around the world (see below). It would provide information on the health status of the people in the region, the needs the community reports, and assesses how well the healthcare system doing is in addressing the needs of people. Specifically, a CCHNA might include:
If desired, we can also help you develop Visual Dashboards that would include interactive displays of burden and performance metrics, maps showing geographic disparities, and performance benchmarking against state/national standards.
