Setting goals is the easy part. Tracking them is where most community health improvement plans stall.
That was the starting point for Closing the Loop: From Community Data to Measurable Impact, a NACCHO webinar hosted by Metopio on October 28. When the session opened, attendees were polled on how they track CHIP progress. The answers were familiar: spreadsheets, sticky notes, and good intentions.
Over the next hour, public health leaders from Illinois, North Dakota, and Wisconsin walked through the full improvement cycle, from community data to assessment, planning, and measured impact. The session closed with the launch of Metopio's new Performance Management & Quality Improvement (PM/QI) module, built to close the gap between the plan a department publishes and the progress it can actually see.
Cook County: One Source of Truth for Community Health Data
Cook County Department of Public Health serves 125 municipalities with complex geographies and diverse populations. When Dr. Scott Smith joined the department five years ago, its health data was scattered across a data portal, topic pages, PDFs, spreadsheets, and individual staff computers.
In 2022, the department launched its Health Atlas with about 110 indicators. Today it holds roughly 550 standardized indicators that staff and the public can explore over time, across population subgroups, and at multiple geographic levels. The Atlas draws about 100 unique users a day. One-off data requests have dropped because the department now points everyone to a single source.
Public data also brought an unexpected benefit. "When you start making your data available, gaps become visible," Smith said. A local epilepsy organization noticed the Atlas had no seizure data and worked with the department to build new indicators. The results showed significant demographic disparities in emergency department visits for seizures.
Those findings matched what a regional hospital's chief medical officer had been seeing. The hospital began developing an outpatient epilepsy center, and partners added patient education and rescue medication so patients no longer need the ED for every seizure. ED visits for one high-risk group are now trending down.
The Atlas went on to become the primary quantitative source for Cook County's Building Healthier Communities 2030 plan. Because the team already knew the data, the assessment and planning process moved significantly faster.
First District Health Unit: Bringing Community Voice into the CHA
First District Health Unit serves seven counties in North Dakota with a small staff and no dedicated data person. Executive Director Holly Brekus said the department outsourced its last community health assessment. It cost a lot of money and didn't produce the result they wanted.
This cycle, the team built the assessment themselves using Metopio. With data sources consolidated in one place, staff stopped spending hours tracking down numbers and justifying where they came from. They also uploaded their focus group transcripts, and the platform pulled out key themes and quotes automatically for the staff to review.
That qualitative layer changed how the findings landed. "It really showed the voice of the community," Brekus said. "People kind of go numb after you read so many statistics. But these were quotes from their neighbors and people they know. These are the people in their community telling other people, 'This is what our community needs.'"
The finished assessment pairs that community voice with secondary data, and it goes to the board on November 19. "We got a really good product," Brekus said. "It's going to be an easy document to work off of and move forward with."
The same workflow has paid off beyond the CHA. For a SAMHSA grant on alcohol use and social norms, a staff member entered interview data and used the same tools to surface themes and quotes for the grant report.
Cook County: Turning 37 CHIP Objectives into Tracked Work
Cook County Department of Public Health is the second-largest health department in the nation. Its Building Healthier Communities 2030 plan has three priorities, eight goals, and 37 measurable objectives. Each one comes with its own strategies, partners, and reporting responsibilities.
Regional Health Officer Dolores Walker leads that work. "Setting goals is easy-ish," she said. "But tracking progress is really hard." The work is spread across internal leads for chronic disease prevention, maternal and child health, and mental health and substance use, along with community partner leads. Progress lives in separate spreadsheets and team trackers.
"It's never been about the work," Walker said. "It's always been about how do we measure it, how do we track it, how do we tell our story." The department answers to its board and, most importantly, to the public.
Walker said she is most excited about Metopio's logic model view, which puts inputs, outputs, outcomes, and short-, medium-, and long-term goals in one place. Teams that prefer SMART goals or a goals-and-objectives structure can use those instead.
How the PM/QI Module Works
Many departments only check progress when a report is due, because the data is spread across too many places to review regularly. Metopio co-founder and COO Angie Grover said that is the gap the new PM/QI module is built to close. It grew out of clients who were already using Metopio's CHIP tools for performance management and asked for the rest of the cycle.
The module follows the Public Health Foundation's four components of performance management: performance standards, measuring performance, reporting progress, and quality improvement. Angie also walked through the five-step PM/QI workflow at ASTHO’s Performance Management Solutions Showcase.
One structured system. Goals, objectives, and metrics from a CHIP, strategic plan, grants, or operational priorities live in one place.
Status at a glance. A dashboard shows every metric as on track, needs attention, off track, or overdue.
Your own language. Teams can relabel statuses, for example "needs attention" instead of "at risk."
Prompts when work falls behind. The platform flags metrics that slip and shows which ones are ready for a QI plan.
A guided QI plan. Teams identify the gap, design an intervention, set a SMART aim, assign an owner, and set a timeline.
Process and outcome metrics, tracked separately. Teams can see which intervention is actually moving the result.
Reports that stay current. Shareable links update as data does, and stakeholders can view them without a Metopio login.
Carleigh Olson of Public Health Madison & Dane County, who convened Wisconsin performance management leaders to shape the module, pointed to the link between population data and program data. That connection, she said, helps departments explain to elected officials why they need resources and what impact the work is having.
"Automation doesn't make quality improvement decisions," Grover said. "The people closest to the work are still those who are determining what needs to change."
From Community Data to Measurable Impact on One Platform
Assessment, planning, and performance management have usually been separate projects, run in separate tools on disconnected data. Metopio brings them onto one platform. Departments get curated data from 500+ sources, CHA tools for both secondary and community data, a CHIP that carries priorities forward, and now PM/QI to track and improve results.
To learn more, schedule a demo with Metopio.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do health departments track CHIP progress?
Effective tracking assigns every CHIP objective a measure, an owner, a target, and a timeline. Teams then review status on a regular schedule rather than only when a report is due. Tracking process and outcome measures separately shows which strategies are actually moving results. Shared reports keep boards, partners, and the public informed between reporting cycles.
What are the four components of public health performance management?
The Public Health Foundation’s performance management framework has four components:
Performance standards: the goals and targets an agency sets.
Performance measurement: the indicators used to track them.
Reporting of progress: how results are shared.
Quality improvement: the structured process for fixing what falls short.
Together they form a continuous cycle rather than a one-time exercise.
How can a health department reduce one-off data requests?
Publish a single, public source of standardized indicators that staff, partners, and residents can explore directly. Cook County Department of Public Health grew its Health Atlas from about 110 indicators in 2022 to roughly 550 today. It now averages about 100 unique users a day, and one-off data requests have dropped as a result.