The Central Ohio Hospital Council (COHC), which includes The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, has recently released its health needs assessment to help hospitals and other organizations better understand the health needs and priorities of Franklin County residents.
Franklin County HealthMap 2013: Navigating Our Way to a Healthier Community Together provides the residents of central Ohio with a comprehensive summary of the community’s health status and needs. The data will be used to develop and implement strategic plans to meet the community health needs identified through the assessment.
The work to conduct a Franklin County needs assessment was first initiated to fulfill a requirement in the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, enacted in March 2010, requiring every tax-exempt hospital to conduct a community health needs assessment (CHNA) and identify strategies that address its findings.
As part of its mission, COHC serves as the forum for community hospitals to collaborate with each other and with other community stakeholders to improve the quality, value, and accessibility of health care in the central Ohio region. Consistent with that mission, central Ohio hospitals believe that the issues facing the community’s health care system can be solved more effectively when working together. While this work started as a hospital initiative, the effort has grown into a multi-stakeholder collaborative, whereby a broad range of local organizations worked together to identify, collect and analyze the health indicators contained in this report.
The Franklin County HealthMap 2013 will be updated every three years, consistent with federal requirements.
