Collaborative development of CollectSMART: Survey Management and Response Tools for assessing the health of your community

Assessing the health of one’s community is an important part of public health accreditation and the new IRS requirement for not-for-profit hospitals under the Affordable Care Act.  Collecting accurate, high quality primary data for Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) can require technical expertise in population sampling, geographic information systems and statistical software. This expertise represents a barrier for many local health departments, community organizations and hospitals tasked with conducting CHNAs. These local health organizations may need to rely on outside support from federal or state agencies or academic partners. 

This session will describe a collaborative effort between the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health and several local health departments in North Carolina to overcome some of these barriers through the development and pilot testing of mobile data collection software and training materials.  The CollectSMART tools and trainings are designed to facilitate the implementation of validated sampling methods without requiring extensive technical expertise and serve as a reliable way for public health professionals to conduct rapid health assessments, and reduce the costs of purchasing or maintaining mapping or data collection hardware and software. The tools and trainings cover the steps of field data collection including forming a survey team, team management, field safety, interview techniques, questionnaire design, sample selection, field survey methods, data collection/analysis and reporting.