A New Community Benefit Web Tool: Informing Partnerships to Improve Community Health

With new requirements from the Affordable Care Act, nonprofit hospitals are working with public health practitioners and other partners to conduct Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) and adopt Implementation Strategies as part of their community benefit obligations. These are important components for working together to improve community health. However, without understanding how a nonprofit hospital is spending community benefit dollars, or the ability to compare with other nonprofit hospitals across the state, region or country, public health officials and community-based organizations do not have all of the information they need to inform a potential partnership. With generous funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a team at The George Washington University’s Department of Health Policy is developing a prototype for a Community Benefit Web Tool to provide easy access to community benefit investment information, along with other key hospital and community data. This tool will assist individuals who are not trained researchers to access key community benefit data framed in a way that will provide a context and an understanding of how community benefit resources can be used to support evidence-based public health strategies that improve community health. This presentation will offer an overview of the Community Benefit Web Tool prototype, share how our colleagues at Community Catalyst are working with us to engage with and educate community-based organizations, highlight key lessons learned from our eight prototype test sites, and demonstrate how this new tool can support and inform interdisciplinary collaborations that can improve community health.