Prioritizing Community Voice to Enhance Community Health Needs Assessments
While the key goal of Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) is to identify and understand the health needs of the community, the process has traditionally not started with the community. Instead, it has started with secondary data sources. The secondary-data first approach has largely been unquestioned because of the massive burden of finding, cleaning, curating, and analyzing data, like public health records and demographics.
However, platforms like Metopio have made secondary data so easy to access and analyze that the burden has been lifted. As a result, we have been able to shift perspectives to prioritize gathering qualitative data which reflects the lived experience of community members.
Now, Metopio is leading a strategic shift to start the CHNA process in the community and center efforts around qualitative data collection and analysis. This simple shift, which can have a big impact, not only facilitates a nimbler process but also enables organizations to gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of community health needs without skipping any critical steps. This leads to more targeted and effective interventions.
The Challenges of Leading with Secondary Data
Secondary data sources, while valuable, can have limitations such as:
Lack of Context: Secondary data provides broad trends over time that are valuable but doesn’t track the context of individual experiences and community dynamics.
Questionable Timeliness: Public health data can be outdated, failing to capture recent changes in community health.
Missed Engagement: Prioritizing secondary data can minimize direct engagement with the community missing a crucial opportunity to understand unique local health challenges and building trust to take action.
Metopio Simple Shift Methodology
After decades of community engagement and more recently software development, we have seen an opportunity to shift the assessment process to prioritize lived experience in the community and help fill important data gaps.
Historically, qualitative data has been challenging to get and analyze. Designing facilitation guides, training staff, organizing events and ensuring participation is part of it. Once that work is done, you must transcribe notes and transcripts before you begin the analysis.
With Metopio’s platform, collecting and analyzing qualitative data is not only easier, but also yields deeper insights into the lived experience of community members. This data can reveal underlying causes of health issues that quantitative data alone might overlook.
Here’s how it works:
Data collection: We recommend starting with interviews, focus groups and surveys to ground the assessment in the voices of the community. Simply take any modes of data collection and add it to Metopio. The platform can take recordings and transcripts into the platform, add survey responses with an API or easy data upload for Metopio to assess and analyze.
Thematic analysis: Once your qualitative data is uploaded, Metopio automatically conducts a preliminary analysis to identify common themes and patterns in the qualitative data. This uncovers key health issues and their root causes. Important quotes are extracted and organized with each theme.
Deeper Insights: The platform takes an additional step to assess sentiment. The sentiment analysis identifies if the community themes are positive, negative or neutral. Metopio goes one step further by combining qualitative insights with secondary data to validate findings and provide a comprehensive view of community health needs.
Partnering with the Community to Share Visions and Wins
Engaging directly with community members sooner in the CHNA process fosters a sense of ownership and empowerment, encouraging them to be participants in the health improvement planning and execution. When people feel heard, seen, and included they are more likely to participate in and support health initiatives that are generated by this in-depth assessment.
Metopio’s qualitative methods allow for real-time feedback and adjustments. They can quickly capture emerging health trends and issues, enabling more agile responses from healthcare providers.
The Comprehensive Impact
Shifting the focus of assessments towards qualitative data collection offers a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of community health needs. This approach not only uncovers hidden health issues but also fosters stronger community engagement and more effective health interventions. By embracing qualitative methods, hospitals can better fulfill their mission of improving community health. And by using Metopio, qualitative methods will no longer feel daunting.
To discuss your qualitative data strategy or learn more, contact sales today.