The State of CHAs and CHIPs in 2025: What Public Health Leaders Told Us at NACCHO360
At this year’s NACCHO360 conference, Metopio set out to understand the current landscape of community health work — the pain points, priorities, and potential of public health departments as they prepare Community Health Assessments (CHAs) and Community Health Improvement Plans (CHIPs).
We heard from hundreds of public health professionals, epidemiologists, directors, administrators, health officers, and more. Here’s what they told us.
Manual Tools Still Dominate — But That’s Not What Public Health Wants
More than 70% of respondents said they still rely on manual tools like Excel for data analysis and visualization. While platforms like Power BI, Tableau, and ArcGIS are gaining ground, their adoption is fragmented, often siloed, and dependent on team-specific skills.
The implication is that most health departments are still managing essential work, like CHAs and CHIPs, through slow, manual processes that sap capacity and limit collaboration.
Opportunity: Public health needs platforms that don’t require technical expertise to use. That means tools that are intuitive, purpose-built, and ready to be shared across teams and partner organizations. Teams need curated data, customizable dashboards, and reporting workflows that are fast, flexible, and easy to use.
CHA & CHIP Workflows Are Still Painful (But They Don’t Have to Be)
Nearly one-third of respondents listed “completing a CHA/CHIP” as a top priority for the next 6–12 months. But it was clear from follow-up answers that many still view these processes as heavy lifts full of fragmented data, time-consuming workflows, and duplicated effort.
Respondents said their top community data challenges include:
Outdated or missing data (56% of survey takers)
Inaccessible geography-level data (52% of survey takers)
Limited staff capacity (42% of survey takers)
Manual collection from too many sources (42% of survey takers)
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. But you can automate the most time-consuming parts of your assessment, from sourcing up-to-date datasets to creating shareable visuals to drafting reports. Users can explore 14+ indicators at the neighborhood level, compare ZIP-code trends across counties, and generate CHA insights with just a few clicks.
Opportunity: An easier way to gather, visualize, and share the data that drives community health priorities. Local leaders want to spend less time stitching together data and more time aligning partners, engaging communities, and driving impact.
Partnerships Matter More Than Ever
63% of respondents ranked “stronger partnerships” as their top strategic priority for the next 12 months.
From nonprofit collaborations to cross-sector strategies with hospitals, FQHCs, and schools, local health departments are under pressure to break down silos and act collectively. But that can’t happen if every partner is looking at different data or operating in different systems.
Opportunity: Collaboration can feel like an uphill climb. But with the right tools, it becomes a shared win.
Metopio makes it easy to align partners by offering:
Shared data environments with role-based permissions
Private workspaces for collaborating across organizations
Dashboards and reports that speak the same language (even across agencies)
Artificial Intelligence Is No Longer “If” — It’s “When & How”
When we asked about AI sentiment, the results were striking: 83.7% expressed positive interest in the future of AI for public health work.
AI must be grounded in public health values: transparency, accuracy, and fairness. Whether helping to surface key trends, recommend indicators, or accelerate reporting, we believe AI should serve the mission, not distract from it.
Opportunity: Public health leaders are open to AI, but want it done right. That means ethical use, clear value, and tools that augment human expertise rather than replace it.
What Public Health Leaders Need Most
Across every response, we saw a consistent pattern: local health departments want to spend less time wrestling with messy data and more time making an impact. Here’s what you're asking for:
Automation: Eliminate hours of manual data entry and cleaning.
Granularity: Get ZIP-code and census-tract-level data, not just state or county numbers.
Accessibility: Platforms that everyone on the team can use—not just analysts.
Collaboration: Built-in ways to align with partners, funders, and community voices.
Trustworthy Data: A single source of truth, curated and up to date.
Metopio was built to meet exactly these needs. From streamlining CHA/CHIP reports to helping you apply for funding, to tracking shared priorities across organizations, we’re here to power what comes next.
The future of public health is collaborative, data-driven, and community-centered. If your team is ready to move from manual workflows to smart, scalable strategies, Metopio is ready to help.
We’ve already helped teams across the country cut months off their CHA timelines, visualize disparities, and communicate impact clearly to their stakeholders. Whether you’re working on your next CHIP, applying for a grant, or simply trying to better understand your community, we’re here to support you.