Making an Impact: Do Your Community Benefit Programs Make a Difference or Merely Exist?

Background: Community health needs assessment results may lead hospitals and health entities to develop or adapt implementation strategies that cover a wide variety of health topics to meet the varying health needs identified. In an effort to align community benefit programs with the hospital goals and community health needs assessment results, academic researchers and hospital staff developed a multi-disciplinary impact evaluation team to identify a unifying mission, themes and goals that cut across all community benefit programs.

Methods: The team developed an overarching prevention and wellness goal with five supporting objectives along with four additional goals with 44 objectives and supporting metrics in four cross-program focus areas. To analyze the impact of community benefit programs, three-year historical data from each program was used to determine the percentage of goals and objectives each program meets. This analysis resulted in an impact score for each program and for all community benefit programs.

Results: Trends in impact scores vary by project across the three year period.  Between 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years, the adjusted impact score for all programs rose from 0.57 to 0.64.

Discussion: Having a unified theme along with evaluation goals and metrics for the community benefit arm provides a more focused approach to examining impact of community benefit programs. This approach to evaluating community benefit programs determines alignment with hospital goals and community needs and determines which programs provide the most impact on the public health of the community.