Reed Healthcare System and CHNA Paper Example

Introduction

Reed Healthcare System provides health services to residents of the Cumberland community in Western Maryland. The community faces dynamic health care needs thereby requires hospitals to be more proactive and strategic in their plans to keep relevant and useful in meeting the community health needs. This need can be achieved by carrying out community health needs assessment.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA)

Community Healthcare Needs Assessment refers to the process of identifying unmet healthcare services to the community. It is part of the patient protection as well as the affordable care act involved as the legal criteria for enhancing the hospital's tax-exempt status. It came into force on March 23, 2012. Based upon the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010), all tax-exempt hospitals should conduct the community health needs assessment after every three years to determine specific health needs of the community and aid them in providing adequate health services to the citizens. CHNA involves monitoring the patterns of the problems that members of the surrounding community face currently, the suitable methods of healthcare service they require to help solve their specific problem as well as their opinions, thoughts, and beliefs concerning what the hospital is currently doing. Also, what the hospital should focus on improving to help produce desired and the most convenient healthcare services. CHNA should involve crucial tools to ensure that it is done both efficiently and effectively (Yingling et al. 2016). The two most effective tools for enhancing effective CHNA include collaborative participation and community engagement. These activities work together to improve the acceptability and the end viability of the hospital in providing services to the local community and meeting the needs of patients who depend on it.

According to King and Roach (2016), CHNA is a fundamental policy that every tax-exempt hospital should put in place to ensure adequate provision of adequate healthcare services to the local community. In so doing, the hospital receives reciprocating benefits in expanding its market. As the hospital becomes more sensitive to the specific needs of the community, it becomes more popular with patients whose needs it addresses. Therefore, hospitals grow both in service and also revenue-wise.

What Reed must do to complete its CHNATo achieve the federal mandate of carrying out the community health needs assessment, Reeds must carry out the following tasks. First, Reeds must identify and engage the relevant stakeholders within the surrounding community that would be instrumental to it in access to the relevant information concerning specific health needs for members of the community. These people may include the community health experts such as public health officers, or the target population that Reed serves including the elderly, women, or children (Pennel et al., 2017). Second, Reed should seek to define the community which it serves. This involves the geographical boundaries within which its services are necessary. Having determined such information, it should find out the number of healthcare providers existing within the geographical extent identified. Third, Reed should collect and analyze a wide range of information about the health needs existing among members of the local community. This should include those that the hospital already provides as well as such services it might not have been producing (King and Roach, 2016). Primary data can be gathered through such methods as interviews, surveys, community meetings, or even through the use of focus groups. As a result, Reed will find out how much significant role it plays in society and also determine the extent of community health needs it should plan to deliver. Fourth, Reed should then prioritize the most pressing community health problems to consider addressing for the benefit of the members of the community (Yingling et al. 2016). After that, Reed should provide the draft of its CHNA so that the stakeholders can go through it too and have the opportunity to give additional feedback concerning the CHNA draft and enhance improvement on the same before it is finalized. This will help the hospitals since the stakeholders that were reached during the community health needs assessment will, therefore, become the ambassadors in spreading the word concerning the needs assessment results. The next step would be to plan the strategies for improving the service to the community by adequately addressing the prioritized needs. The strategic plans are then supposed to be implemented to achieve the desired results. Finally, Reed should conduct a proper evaluation of the progress during the implementation of the adopted strategic plans to ensure everything runs as planned.

CHNA Influence on Reed Healthcare Business Strategy

Given the dynamic health needs of the members of the community, Reed will have to put in place the appropriate means of addressing such needs most amicably to enable it to maintain its top position in the provision of healthcare services to the surrounding community. Based on the CHNA requirement, Reed Healthcare will need to adopt a more flexible strategy to accommodate all members of the community that it serves through open communication. This might involve adopting such strategies as surveying the patients, making advertisements through the social media platforms, as well as convening a 'think tank' of the public health experts to facilitate active discussion of the current health needs or problems affecting the community.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Reed health system will require to identify and engage relevant stakeholders throughout the CHNA process to ensure success in identifying and addressing relevant community health needs to members of the community. Open communication would be vital to keep stakeholders abreast with the current community health needs and enhance effective strategic plan implementation alongside regular evaluation of progress.

References

King, C. J., & Roach, J. L. (2016). Community health needs assessments: a framework for America's hospitals. Population health management, 19(2), 78-80.

Pennel, C. L., McLeroy, K. R., Burdine, J. N., Matarrita-Cascante, D., & Wang, J. (2017). A mixed-methods strategy for understanding community participation in community health needs assessments. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 23(2), 112-121.

Yingling, L. R., Brooks, A. T., Wallen, G. R., Peters-Lawrence, M., McClurkin, M., Cooper-McCann, R., ... & Curry, R. K. E. (2016). Community engagement to optimize the use of web-based and wearable technology in cardiovascular health and needs assessment study: a mixed methods approach. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 4(2).