EVALCORP’s evaluation team has partnered with health systems in Southern California since 2018 to assess and improve the health of diverse communities. Through three comprehensive Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) cycles and multiple Implementation Strategy (IS) engagements, our team has worked to identify, prioritize, and address the health challenges facing thousands of residents, while building strong, trusted relationships with local leaders. Before we delve into the details, we clarify a few terms below.
What is a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA)?
A CHNA is a structured evaluation of the health concerns and strengths within a hospital’s surrounding community. The CHNA process helps not-for-profit health care organizations fulfill their community benefit mission. The provision of community benefits is essential to nonprofit healthcare organizations and is a requirement for maintaining their tax-exempt status under the IRS. For more detail, see our previous post on CHNAs.
What is a CHNA Implementation Strategy?
Community Health Needs Assessment cycles don’t end when the data is collected—they’re just getting started. The Implementation Strategy phase is where hospitals and health systems transform those crucial insights into actionable plans, partnering with community stakeholders to address the most pressing health needs identified in the assessment. These engagements turn statistical findings into real-world impact, creating roadmaps that guide everything from new patient programs to community partnerships over the next three years.
Building Rigorous, Responsive CHNAs Across Regions
Since 2018, the EVALCORP team has designed and implemented CHNAs for a not-for-profit hospital serving multiple counties across Southern California. Each cycle, the scope has grown, with more regions included and greater collaboration with community stakeholders. Using both quantitative and qualitative data collection strategies, EVALCORP engaged more than 2,700 individuals.
As part of the needs assessment process, we provided the following services:
- Developed a Community Engagement Plan for each region
- Partnered with Hospital Community Managers to identify appropriate data-collection initiatives and engagement strategies to reach underserved communities
- Helped hospitals understand the social determinants of health driving health outcomes in these communities
- Integrated large-scale public health data with insights from hundreds of key informants representing housing, food access, clinics, behavioral health, and more
- Conducted extensive interviews with key informants
- Utilized evidence-based methods and formal prioritization matrices
- Brought transparency and rigor to the identification and ranking of health needs, ensuring that all regions’ priorities were recognized and addressed
Each assessment concluded with a custom-tailored Implementation Strategy that achieved the following:
- Outlined specific funding and action plans for the next three years in each community
- Aligned national health system goals with local partners’ lived experiences
- Ensured investments were both consistent and locally relevant.
This multi-year partnership demonstrates how CHNAs can evolve from compliance exercises into powerful tools for community transformation. By centering community voices and combining data-driven rigor with local insight, EVALCORP helped turn complex health needs into clear, actionable strategies that meaningfully improve health outcomes across Southern California’s diverse communities.
Turning Data into Decisions
Our analysis confirmed and expanded on what Community Health Managers already understood from their direct work in the communities. They had a sense of their service areas’ health needs through their daily engagement, but our data analysis—combining the community health dashboard with additional quantitative sources and insights from key informant interviews—gave them the specific evidence they needed.
One Community Health Manager was considering whether to support a community group’s funding application, and they used our analysis to confidently back the proposal. This combination of data and community insight gave Community Health Managers the evidence and confidence to direct resources where they’d have the most impact.
Bringing Stakeholders Together
The Community Health Manager wanted hospital leadership input on priorities, so we presented our findings and facilitated a discussion among the group. What started as a planning conversation became a rich dialogue that added valuable context and meaning to our data. We realized the discussion itself was an important data source—essentially a focus group—so we incorporated it into our analysis. This taught us that sometimes the most meaningful insights come from bringing stakeholders together to discuss findings, not just from the data alone. Important insight can be generated when stakeholders are involved in the evaluation process.
A Tailored Approach
We tailored our approach by working closely with each service area’s Community Health Manager to understand what mattered most to their local communities. These managers helped us identify the right people to interview, up to 60 key informants across all regions, ensuring we captured important community perspectives that quantitative data alone couldn’t reveal. We customized our data sources and methods for each area, providing practical analyses that Community Health Managers could use to prioritize community needs and plan targeted interventions. This approach allowed us to address each community’s unique needs while maintaining the consistency our client requires across its national CHNA program.
What Health Systems Can Expect When Working with EVALCORP on CHNAs
Health systems partnering with EVALCORP for Community Health Needs Assessments can expect evaluation support that:
- Fulfills IRS requirements while going beyond compliance to create meaningful community impact
- Engages diverse community voices through culturally responsive data collection strategies
- Integrates quantitative data with qualitative insights from key informants and stakeholders
- Provides clear, evidence-based prioritization of health needs using formal matrices and rigorous methods
- Delivers actionable Implementation Strategies that align national goals with local realities
- Builds lasting partnerships between hospitals and community organizations
- Equips Community Health Managers with the data and confidence to make strategic funding decisions
EVALCORP’s multi-year partnership with Southern California health systems demonstrates that comprehensive CHNAs can be powerful catalysts for community transformation, turning complex health data into clear strategies that meaningfully improve health outcomes for thousands of residents.
If you’re interested in learning more about our needs assessment services, we’d love to hear from you!