How St. Luke's Health System and Intermountain Health Turned Priorities into Targeted, Fundable Projects
About the Customer
The Western Idaho Community Health Collaborative (WICHC) is a multi-sector, public-private partnership established in 2019 to address the social drivers of health across a 10-county footprint in Southwest Idaho — a mix of rural communities and one urban center. Today, WICHC includes more than 16 member organizations, among them health systems, public health districts, nonprofits, social service agencies, and Boise State University.
Two of WICHC's anchor partners are St. Luke's Health System, represented by Angie Gribble, Senior Director of Community Health and Engagement, and Intermountain Health, represented by Stephanie Stokes, Community Health Children’s Health Manager. In 2023, WICHC completed the first-ever collaborative Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) conducted across multiple partner organizations in the same Idaho region.
The Challenge
Healthcare is in constant flux — mergers, acquisitions, and, more recently, sweeping federal policy shifts like the Medicaid changes passed under HB1 and the new Rural Health Transformation Program — all of which are pushing states to rethink how they sustain rural health access.
Beyond market disruption, WICHC's CHNA surfaced a second, quieter problem. The collaborative's top priorities — housing, mental/behavioral health, and access to care — were real, but they were named at a level that felt too broad to act on. Historically, organizations facing this kind of assessment default to programming they're already comfortable with and can loosely tag to a priority area ("that addresses housing," "that's mental health") without being able to measure whether it's actually moving the needle. And across a 10-county footprint with significant rural variation, a plan built around "access to care" in the abstract risked missing how that need actually showed up for any specific community, which meant losing the trust of the people the collaborative was there to serve.
The Solution
Before data collection even began, WICHC's partners made deliberate choices about how they'd work together — choices rooted in the three things that let a collaborative move beyond assessment into real action:
Financial investment. Pooling resources, with one member agency agreeing to backbone the agreements and steward the pooled finances, signaled commitment and gave the work staying power.
Trust. With long-tenured local partners alongside newer entrants to the market, WICHC made space to build trust deliberately — creating opportunities to genuinely listen and ensuring every partner's expertise was weighted equally.
Transparency. Each partner came to the table with different compliance and accreditation requirements. Naming those non-negotiables early meant the group could find where they had room to compromise — and where they didn't.
That foundation supported a collective impact model built on shared data and shared measurement, which is what led WICHC to Metopio.
““Needs assessments can move us towards action when we do them together.””
How Metopio Changed the Process
Moving from a countywide priority to a single census tract. Metopio's Health Atlas tool let WICHC drill into census-tract-level data to see exactly how a broad priority like housing showed up in specific communities, rather than treating a 10-county region as one undifferentiated need.
Promoting data-informed, not data-duplicated, community engagement. Because so much was already accessible in Metopio, WICHC only needed to design surveys, focus groups, and interviews to fill in what the data couldn't already tell them — instead of asking community members to answer repetitive questions. The goal was combining "efficiencies and comprehensive data" with the community voice needed to round out the full picture.
Advancing from assessment to action. A new level of precision helped WICHC move straight from data to deployment: directing resources to the census tract where they'd have the most impact, with a clear way to evaluate results against WICHC's next CHNA. The partners' next step is defining shared success metrics for the initiative together — extending the same collaborative model that built the assessment into how they measure the outcome.
A real-world case: housing in Nampa, Idaho. When WICHC's 2023 CHNA named housing as a priority, NeighborWorks Boise — a national affordable housing nonprofit and WICHC member, but not a health-sector organization — saw an opening to partner. Together, WICHC and NeighborWorks used Metopio to run a feasibility assessment across housing's underlying drivers (stability, quality and safety, affordability, and neighborhood conditions) and identified quality and safety, specifically home repair, as the area where NeighborWorks' existing resources and WICHC's data lined up.
From there, Metopio's mapping and comparison tools let the team pinpoint exactly where to target their resources. Looking at their service areas at the census-tract level, one tract stood out consistently across three separate indicators:
Older median year built for housing structures
A higher share of homes lacking kitchen facilities
A higher share of homes lacking complete plumbing
Metopio's side-by-side comparison view let the team see just how far that tract diverged from Nampa citywide and from Canyon County as a whole — turning "housing is a countywide priority" into a specific, targetable, and fundable project.
“What does the data say? What is our community asking us to do? What’s feasible within our scope? Is it aligned with our mission? Okay, great — now let’s find the resources locally, or in other places, to be able to meet that challenge, instead of letting the funding drive our work.” ”
Is Your Collaborative Ready to Turn Broad Priorities Into Targeted Action?
If your community health needs assessment surfaced priorities that feel too big to act on, Metopio can help you find where they actually live — down to the census tract. From shared data infrastructure to feasibility mapping to matching partners around a common set of numbers, we help collaboratives move from assessment to action, and keep moving even when the market underneath them shifts.
Resources:
Webinar Recording: Building Collaborative Community Health Systems That Survive Market Change
Blog Recap: Collaboration in an Era of Seismic Market Shifts