WRI is conducting community health needs assessments for the South Jersey Health Collaborative in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester counties. South Jersey Health Collaborative members include Cooper University Health Care, Jefferson Health, Lourdes Health System, and Virtua Health.
The project is central to WRI’s mission and helps advance our work in population health on behalf of the region.
WRI has proposed an engaging approach to what can be a formulaic, compliance driven pursuit. Mandated by the federal government once every three years for nonprofit hospitals, community health needs assessments often produce sit-on-the shelf information that does less than it might to inform hospitals’ engagement with their service regions.
WRI’s process is at once deeply community driven – resulting in a shared inclusive process — and methodologically sophisticated, where primary data collection and analysis happens hand in hand with secondary data analysis and we employ analytical techniques rare to the field.
The result is rich actionable information that identifies hard to detect local and regional patterns and is owned by the community as well as the health system.