Cross-Sector Partnerships and the Dashboard-Ready Community

In Colorado’s Weld County, organizations from all sectors of the economy are using a community dashboard to improve consumer and population health and yield a sustainable surge in prosperity. The North Colorado Health Alliance and the Weld County Department of Public Health operationalized a dashboard to engage partner organizations in formulating a calendar-driven plan for collective impact and engage the population at the grassroots level.

The utility of a population health dashboard depends on cross-sector commitment to shared goals and a desired destination. Leadership, advocacy, and consistent strategic messaging in broadly accessible terms may be necessary for many months in order to create a shared language of high-level outcomes. The dashboard-ready community must share a universally appealing idea about where it is trying to get, the sort of idea that is often met with resistance by organizations and individuals deep in expertise, mired in detail, and entrenched in status quo operations.

Healthy People 2020 provides a destination and a sense of urgency. Reaching these population health goals in six years requires an end to business as usual. Leadership, advocacy, and consistent strategic messaging are necessary to instill an appropriate sense of urgency throughout a community.

The North Colorado Health Alliance, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, gives community partners a forum for developing a shared strategic language, disseminates consistent and accessible messaging throughout the community, contributes to coordinated population movement, and uses the dashboard to accelerate velocity of change.