Miles Away, Worlds Apart: Assessing Community Health Needs with exploreMOhealth — 2021

The places where we live, work, learn and play affect our health. Examples throughout this brief show that communities separated by a distance of a few miles can be worlds apart in terms of upstream health factors that result in downstream health outcomes, such as poor quality of life and premature mortality. The more that is known about these places, the better hospitals, clinicians and community-based partners can identify and address the influence of these factors on health. Assessing hundreds of community health and social factors across and within Missouri counties is a powerful strategy for optimizing the allocation of scarce resources to maximize the effectiveness of community health improvement efforts.

The traditional delivery of health care is moving beyond just treatment within the walls of hospitals and into managing the health of populations in the community. Health care providers are beginning to increase their focus on upstream social determinants of health that often lead to poor health outcomes. This shift is being driven in part by new regulations that require hospitals to work with public health experts, such as local public health agencies, to develop community health needs assessments and improvement plans to maintain their not-for-profit status. These factors are expediting the collaborative delivery of care across the continuum — integrating voices from public health, social service and community action organizations. It is critical that these collaborative efforts are founded on insightful, firm data that identify areas of need within different populations and across geographic locations.

In March 2018, the Missouri Hospital Association and Missouri Foundation for Health released exploreMOhealth, a community health needs assessment platform developed through a partnership with the University of Missouri’s Center for Applied Research and Engagement Systems. The platform is designed to assist community heath stakeholders in the development of impactful CHNAs using two rich sources of health-related data that are unique to Missouri — the Missouri County-Level Study from MFH and the Missouri ZIP Health Rankings from the Hospital Industry Data Institute and Washington University School of Medicine.

Through a new partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings & Roadmaps Program and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, the exploreMOhealth platform now offers the latest CHR data for Missouri’s 114 counties and St. Louis City.

Since its launch, exploreMOhealth has been queried more than 30,000 times by 17,600 individual users, resulting in nearly 80,000 page views. Community health stakeholders from a variety of disciplines — hospitals, regional health commissions, local public health and community action organizations — are using the site to gain hyperlocal insights on the health and social well-being of their communities.

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