How Milwaukee’s Unified Health Assessment Model Is Transforming Public Health & Hospital Collaboration
Siloed data strategies just don’t cut it anymore. But models from trailblazing organizations like the Milwaukee Health Care Partnership — a public private consortium of the four main health systems in Milwaukee County — are leading to positive strategic changes in the way Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) are done.
At our latest webinar, Leveraging Collaborative Data to Improve Health Outcomes, co-hosted with the Wisconsin Public Health Association, attendees learned how automation, shared data platforms, and cross-sector collaboration are driving smarter, more equitable health strategies across Wisconsin and beyond.
At the heart of their model is Health Compass Milwaukee — a publicly accessible atlas powered by Metopio that integrates hospital, public health, and community-based data into one shared ecosystem. With built-in tools for disaggregation by race, income, geography, and more, Health Compass Milwaukee helps stakeholders identify the real-world factors — like housing instability, transportation barriers, and mental health needs — that are most impacting health outcomes. By standardizing and automating the CHNA process, organizations can reduce manual lift, focus on what matters most, and generate real-time insights that drive collective action.
This isn’t just about accessing better data; it’s about using it to make better decisions. By shifting to digital CHNA reports and building upstream issue profiles (like housing and youth health), Milwaukee Health Care Partnership has created a replicable model for using localized data to influence strategy, investment, and program design. Whether it’s coordinating hospital data to address racial disparities in ED visits, or crafting actionable lead poisoning interventions with hyperlocal data, Milwaukee’s unified framework is showing what’s possible when technology, equity, and collaboration align.
Speakers Angie Grover (COO, Metopio) and Justin Rivas (Director of Community Health Initiatives, Milwaukee Health Care Partnership) emphasized that the key to sustainable health improvement isn’t more data — it’s better data, shared effectively. With support from NACCHO and statewide partners, this model is helping public health leaders reimagine CHNAs not as a compliance checkbox, but as a real-time engine for change.
Check out Health Compass Milwaukee here: https://healthcompassmilwaukee.org/