2014 Healthy Communities Achievement Award
The DC Healthy Communities Collaborative was recognized as a winner of the 2014 Healthy Communities Achievement Award for their initiative to develop, implement, and fund a truly collaborative, community-engaged approach for community health improvement, the DC Health Matters portal.
Read the full submission below and visit Healthy Communities Achievement Award to learn more about the award.
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Background
Use this section to provide a brief introduction to your program to help us better understand your community, the population served, and the opportunity you chose to address.
Our DC Health Matters initiative provides the DC community with a centralized source of validated, actionable information in a format that our community helped define. Based on structured community feedback, Children’s National’s led the effort to redesign the DC Health Matters interface into an accessible, easily understood, and interactive web portal. The enthusiasm for and utilization of this portal is a clear indication that our efforts – combined with HCI’s flexibility, creativity, and technical expertise – hit the mark!
The newly designed DC Health Matters portal houses our community health needs assessment (CHNA) and corresponding health improvement plan (CHIP) – in written and interactive formats. The CHNA relied heavily on data within DC Health Matters and was developed in tandem with several community stakeholders. The DC Health Matters portal is a ‘living’ initiative that will continue to evolve along with the changing community, environment, and healthcare system needs and resources.
Goals and Objectives
In 500 words or less, tell us about your goals and objectives. How did you decide to address the need you identified? What goals did you set? What was your timeframe?
The goals for our DC Health Matters initiative included:
Goal 1: To ensure that DC Health Matters reflected true community input, feedback, and voice.
We envisioned a site that was built with and not just “for” community partners. By providing a site that reflected community values, interests, and needs, our hope is to have DC Health Matters serve as a platform for validated, actionable information that is a key facilitator of community health improvement in the DC area.
Goal 2: To enable DC Health Matters to serve as a living community health needs assessment (CHNA) for the DC area.
We strove to have DC Health Matters be the ultimate source for information on the health-related needs and assets in DC. Until now, there was no centralized source for local community health information. Many community-based organizations expressed routine frustration in accessing reliable and understandable community health data. We have positioned the DC Health Matters portal to respond to the information challenges faced by community organizations.
Goal 3: To ensure that DC Health Matters serves as a motivator and catalyst for lasting community health improvements in the DC area.
Community health improvements require a combination of passion, valid information, true collaboration, and sustainable partnerships. Being a hospital that is committed to improving local health, we felt strongly that our peer hospitals should share responsibility, resources, outcomes and accountability in complying with health reform requirements to assess and address community health. The overarching objective of this coordinated endeavor was to improve community health and health equity by devising, executing, and evolving a comprehensive community health improvement plan for DC. We positioned DC Health Matters to facilitate this process by serving as an objective data source, repository for health information, and a visible community platform.
Description of Activities
In more detail, describe the activities you conducted to meet your goals and objectives. Include specific information about how you created change in your community.
Goal 1: To ensure that DC Health Matters reflected true community input, feedback, and voice.
To ensure that DC Health Matters reflected true community engagement, we engaged community-based organizations (CBOs) in designing our DC Health Matters portal. We held several forums and focus groups to determine what our CBOs needed and how the current HCI products matched those needs. We found that the CBOs appreciated the existing HCN portal, but felt that it was geared towards more of a research audience. They wanted a more tailored, easily navigable source that reflected the DC aesthetic. We worked with HCI and an external vendor to incorporate the findings from our forums to address community insights. Children’s National’s leadership resulted in a redesigned community-driven portal that will serve our CBOs in their work to improve community health. Additionally, several HCI clients requested similar interface changes after viewing the DC Health Matters portal; this has led to HCI adapting their core HCN product to reflect many of the stylistic tweaks made to the DC site. The DC team is proud to play a part in this important effort to align the HCN portal more closely to community audiences.
Goal 2: To enable DC Health Matters to serve as a living community health needs assessment (CHNA) for the DC area.
We collaborated with hospitals, clinics, community-based organizations, and other stakeholders to produce one comprehensive, data-driven DC city-wide CHNA based on data within DC Health Matters. To ensure that our portal was a robust resource for understanding community assets and needs, we have added 100+ additional local metrics to HCI’s standard offering. In addition, we posted an interactive CHNA to DC Health Matters that provides useful snapshots of information on priority areas by way of vibrant informatics that emphasize information provided in the written CHNA.
As a result of being awarded an AHRQ grant, we are identifying the information needs of parents of children with special health care needs to ascertain potential metrics that will better serve their needs; the DC Health Matters portal will serve as the key vehicle for health-related metrics dissemination.
Goal 3: To ensure that DC Health Matters serves as a motivator and catalyst for lasting community health improvements in the DC area.
Outreach efforts are key in positioning DC Health Matters as a catalyst for community health improvement. We continue to solicit community feedback on the portal and work with HCI in ensuring that the portal continues to evolve to meet community needs. As a specific example of our portal serving as a motivator for change: we received endorsement of the portal by Todd Park, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer. Mr. Park keynoted our DC Health Matters kickoff event in June 2013. He commended DC Health Matters in addressing barriers to accessing community health data information and local resources. Having the acknowledgement from Mr. Park served as a motivator for CBOs to take note of the portal as vehicle to support local community health improvement.
Results/Impact
What results did you achieve? Did you meet your goals and objectives? How did you measure this?
The following results have been achieved:
- Incorporation of feedback from beta-test evaluators resulting in an enhanced DC Health Matters web portal with robust content, navigation, and functionality
- Launch of a uniquely redesigned, tailored, community-driven web portal in June 2013
- Endorsement of DC Health Matters by Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer for the United States
- High utilization in nearly every state, as well as international usage: in ~8 months, the site has attracted 2,700+ unique visitors, 4,700+ visits, and 16,000+ page views; nearly every state in the US has accessed the site, as well as several countries
- Development of a Citywide CHNA and CHIP that relied heavily on data within the DC Health Matters portal
- Conduction of several community based trainings/information sessions on DC Health Matters
- Presentations on DC Health Matters at local and national conferences, including a podium presentation at the American Public Health Association meeting that draws 10K+ attendees
- Circulation of a quarterly DC Health Matters newsletter to keep community partners and other stakeholders informed
- Development of DC Health Matters Advisory Board which will provide advice, feedback, and serve as a champion for DC Health Matters
- Media attention by a highly regarded DC news reporter – Ben Fischer – that resulted in an article in the Washington Business Journal
- Publication of a peer-reviewed manuscript that describes the DC Health Matters initiative in the Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved
- Acquisition of grant funding to support DC Health Matters from two government agencies: National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
What was creative or unique about your approach?
Funding: we were aggressive in securing funding for our DC Health Matters-related work and received funding from NIH and AHRQ. We believe in the power of using a combination of informatics and community engagement to improve health.
Continuous Community Involvement: we continue to incorporate a high level of community engagement in our processes. We are not building this site for community organizations – we are building it with them. This highlights our unique approach since bi-directional dialogue is often missing in community-based research.
Collaborative Approach Among DC Providers: we continue to apply a collaborative approach to our DC Health Matters-related work. It is uncommon that DC providers (hospitals, clinics) join forces to work in a synergetic manner. To this point, we were awarded the Champion of Change Award by the District of Columbia Primary Care Association for working collaboratively and breaking down barriers to focus on improving local health.
Describe any partnerships that were formed or organizations you collaborated with
The DC Health Matters initiative was a pivotal force in forming the DC Healthy Communities Collaborative (DCHCC). The DCHCC includes four local DC hospitals and four community health centers who have joined forces to facilitate community health improvement in DC: Children’s National Health System, Howard University Hospital, Providence Hospital, Sibley Memorial Hospital, Bread for the City, Community of Hope, Mary’s Center, and Unity Health Care. We are very proud of the diversity that our Collaborative represents which also echoes the diversity of our city. Our Collaborative partners symbolize the variances in our city by being able to represent all groups from the needs of the poor and underserved, culturally diverse populations, the elderly, and children. The DCHCC is the funding sponsor for the DC Health Matters portal. The DCHCC’s breadth of diversity enables DC Health Matters to resonate with a vast array of DC residents.
Which of the following portion(s) of your HCI product was used in your efforts?
Promising Practices
Demographics
Local Trackers
GIS Maps
Reporting Tools (Report Assistant/Indicator Comparison)
Additional resources
2013 Interactive Community Health Needs Assessment
DCHCC Community Health Improvement Plan FY 2014-2016
Health Beat Biz Report - Washington Business Journal, July 1, 2013