Miles Away, Worlds Apart: Assessing Community Health Needs with exploreMOhealth — 2020

The places where we live, work, learn and play affect our health. Examples throughout this brief show that communities often are separated by a distance of a few miles, but they 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.

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 health 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 and 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.

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