Smarter Strategy Through Shared Insights: How CHRISTUS Health Created “Communities of Focus”
About the Customer
CHRISTUS Health is a faith-based health system serving communities across urban and rural areas in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and New Mexico. With a deep commitment to health equity, CHRISTUS uses its Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) as a strategic tool—not a shelf document—to guide improvements in both clinical and community health programs. By embedding CHNA data into systemwide operations, CHRISTUS is aligning efforts across departments and geographies to close gaps and improve outcomes.
The Challenge
With hospitals spread across four states, CHRISTUS Health faced a familiar but complex challenge: aligning departments and facilities around a consistent, equity-focused strategy. In the past, different teams assessed and measured needs in different ways, limiting collaboration and impact.
Key barriers included:
Lack of Alignment Across Geographies: Urban and rural hospitals operated in silos, with limited standardization.
Siloed Departmental Approaches: Clinical, community, and quality teams each used separate data sources and frameworks.
Underutilized CHNA Data: The CHNA had potential—but wasn’t consistently used to support regulatory or strategic objectives.
The Solution
CHRISTUS Health reimagined its CHNA as a foundation for equity-focused strategy and built a unified framework to define “Communities of Focus” across the system. With Metopio, the team developed a consistent and scalable process to link clinical and community data.
Here's how they did it:
Stratified ED Data by Race, Ethnicity & Payer: They began by analyzing emergency department utilization, focusing on disparities by Medicare, Medicaid, and uninsured patients.
Identified Preventable Conditions: Diagnosis codes flagged conditions like heart disease, asthma, and diabetes—highlighting avoidable admissions.
Aggregated Data in Metopio: All data was uploaded in a de-identified format at the ZIP code level to maintain privacy while identifying trends.
Connected Community Conditions: Using Metopio’s data, they layered in social vulnerability, area deprivation, economic hardship, and life expectancy to better understand population needs.
Created a Community Needs Index: Leveraging Metopio’s Index Builder, CHRISTUS combined all variables into a powerful, custom-built Community Needs Index to guide action.
Metopio’s Impact
Cross-Department Collaboration: The “Communities of Focus” framework is now used by Quality & Safety, Clinical Analytics, Population Health, Nursing, and Community Health teams.
Strategic Integration: Priorities identified in the CHNA—like reducing heart-related ED visits and addressing food insecurity—are embedded in CHRISTUS’s systemwide strategic plan.
Actionable Hyperlocal Data: The team can now analyze and act on ZIP code-level insights, driving targeted, measurable interventions.
Regulatory Support: CHNA data supports equity requirements across multiple departments—elevating the assessment from compliance to strategy.
What’s Next for CHRISTUS Health
CHRISTUS is continuing to expand its data capabilities by:
Developing consistent patient data stratification
Integrating clinical quality data
Defining process and outcome measures
Including patient satisfaction and performance metrics
Together, these elements will strengthen the Community Needs Index and create a more robust, systemwide framework for measuring health equity.
““The partnership with Metopio was instrumental in accessing and analyzing hyperlocal data to identify common health disparities across populations and service areas.””
Is your organization ready to use data to improve community health? Schedule your customized tour of Metopio today!