Abstract
The Affordable Care Act of 2008 placed specific community health needs assessment and community benefit reporting requirements on US not-for-profit hospitals. The requirements are straightforward, but come with no expectation for synergy between the needs assessment and the community benefit spending, no direction on how to design systems to improve community health, and with surprisingly little accountability for improving health outcomes. With the help of diverse community partners, one Critical Access hospital in rural Vermont has successfully linked the needs assessment with community benefit dollars to address upstream contributors of health. In 2014, Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital lead the creation of NEK Prosper: Caledonia and Southern Essex Accountable Health Community with a mission to tackle poverty as the ultimate root cause of poor health in the region. This article outlines how a hospital community health needs assessment ignited a change in how community partners worked together, aligned organizational strategies, and overcame industry jargon barriers to create regional system change to improve health. And how that same hospital has used community benefit dollars to accelerate action at the community level.
Highlights
This article outlines how Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital (NVRH) is able to use its community health needs assessment as both a catalyst to change how community partners work together, and to inform how best to spend the hospital community benefit dollars to impact community health.NVRH is a 25 bed Critical Access Hospital in northern Vermont
Low income adults are more likely to suffer difficulties in their daily lives due to chronic illness, while children living in poverty are often left with risk factors that can affect their health throughout their lives [3] tackling poverty in the hospital service area became a priority issue for NVRH and its leaders, the CEO
Using Results Based AccountabilityTM (RBA) principles, the Well-Nourished Collaborative Action Networks (CANs) tracks the number of sites using Food Hero materials, social media engagements, and the number of Food Hero recipes distributed to measure performance level results
Summary
NVRH is a 25 bed Critical Access Hospital in northern Vermont. The 2012 NVRH Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) identified poverty as one of the top health priority areas. Low income adults are more likely to suffer difficulties in their daily lives due to chronic illness, while children living in poverty are often left with risk factors that can affect their health throughout their lives [3] tackling poverty in the hospital service area became a priority issue for NVRH and its leaders, the CEO. As part of the 2012 CHNA implementation plan, NVRH committed to convene community leaders to address the issue of poverty as the upstream, systemic driver of poor health and health inequity
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