Community Health Needs Assessment
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires nonprofit hospitals to conduct Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs), and to make these reports accessible to the public.
Conducting these assessments and making them available to the public meets our obligations under these new federal requirements. More than that, these assessments reflect Boone Health’s long-standing commitment to working with people in our communities to identify and address the most urgent health needs in the communities we serve.
Introduction
In the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed in March 2010, non-profit hospitals were mandated to conduct a community health needs assessment every three years, adopt an implementation plan to meet the community health needs identified in the CHNA and make both reports widely available to the public.
As part of the mandate, hospitals must define their community. Boone Hospital Center, located along the I-70 corridor of central Missouri in Columbia MO, has defined its community as Boone County. The hospital conducted the community health needs assessment in 2016.
Community Description
Boone Hospital Center is located in Boone County in the city of Columbia, Missouri, the county seat and largest city in Boone County. For the purpose of this CHNA, the hospital’s defined community is Boone County.
Boone County has a population of 174,974 (2015 Census estimate). The population experienced a 7.6 percent increase from 2010 to 2015, a significant growth for the county.
The county population is comprised of 82.3 percent of white, 9.6 percent of African American, 3.3 percent of Hispanics and 7.6 percent of others. Almost 93.2 percent of Boone County population has high school or higher degree and 47.7 percent has a bachelor or higher degree. The median household income is $49,059
Conducting the Needs Assessment
Boone Hospital Center conducted a focus group to solicit feedback from community stakeholders, public health experts and those with a special interest in the health needs of residents located in Boone County.
Boone Hospital Center formed an internal workgroup of clinical and non-clinical staff with knowledge of the community and patients to review the focus group results and the secondary data in order to provide input into the priority needs of the county.
Finally, the findings from both groups were merged and ranked using a ranking process to assign weight to criteria by using an established criteria for priority. Each member was asked to consider size and seriousness of the problem based on her or his knowledge of the issues.
Implementation Plan
The Implementation Plan is a written strategy that describes what Boone Hospital Center plans to do to address community health needs identified, either independently or in collaboration with others. It includes rationale for why a need was selected, measurable goals and objectives, an action plan, and an evaluation process to determine if successful.
The plan also identified needs that will not be addressed by the hospital and why that decision was made. The Implementation Plan will be updated as community needs and priorities change, hospital resources change or based on the evaluation results.