The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that nonprofit hospitals and
health systems complete a “Community Health Needs Assessment” has given
healthcare providers the opportunity to further improve health in the
communities they serve.
It’s also opened the door to confusion about the best way to achieve
that goal.
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George Huber, J.D. |
“Most hospitals are primarily concerned about having the right services
in place to address individual patient needs and have been understandably
cautious about venturing into the broad un-reimbursable field of public health
and, specifically, community health,” said
George Huber, J.D., M.S.I.E.,M.S.S.M., associate dean for policy at Pitt Public Health. Mr. Huber, a board member of the
Hospital and Health System Association of Pennsylvania, conceived the initiative.
“However, improving community health has historically been a focus of
most American hospitals,” he said. “Public health experts are here to help
hospital leadership achieve this goal while meeting Affordable Care Act
requirements and maximizing benefits to hospitals and the communities they
serve.”
Under the Affordable Care Act, nonprofit hospitals and health systems
must collect data, engage their communities, build a strategic plan to address
identified community health needs, implement interventions to improve community
health and analyze their results every three years.
The Pitt Public Health team incorporates the latest public health
research and best practices into their webinars. The team aims to help
hospitals wade through the wealth of existing information and data on community
health, such as birth rates and mortality, which can aid in performing their
assessment, as well as how to identify and engage the diverse communities they
serve.
Presented in an interview format moderated by Mr. Huber, the webinars
feature the Pitt Public Health expertise of Steven Albert, Ph.D., professor and
chair; Jessica Burke, Ph.D., assistant professor; Donna Doebler, Ph.D.,
visiting assistant professor; and Beth Nolan, Ph.D., assistant professor, all
of the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences, and Edmund
Ricci, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Evaluation Science in Public
Health.