How should a hospital define their community for a Community Health Needs Assessment? In this video, Kelsey Anderson, Strategic Healthcare Analyst at Carnahan Group responds.

When a hospital thinks about defining their Community Health Needs Assessment community, it’s important to consider that this is going to look a little bit different than, say, their start community or a market they would typically look at for business development purposes.

It’s really important here to avoid the exclusion of medically underserved or low-income populations, and one way that we do this and that we recommend our clients do this, is to include whole counties in a geographical Community Health Needs Assessment community definition.

For every community definition, Carnahan Group will review inpatient discharge data, just to ensure that we’re taking a good look at the hospital’s geographical patient draw. There is no right or wrong percentage that needs to be included, but that helps us to zoom in and look at demographic data to ensure that those specific populations of medically underserved folks and low-income people have not been systematically excluded in any way.