Community Health Innovation

CDC Offers Resources for Designing and Building Healthy Places

The way we design and build our communities can affect our physical and mental health. Healthy community design integrates evidence-based health strategies into community planning, transportation, and land-use decisions.

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Commission to Build a Healthier America Issues Recommendations

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) formed the Commission to Build a Healthier America to investigate why Americans aren’t as healthy as they could be and to look outside the health care system for ways to improve health for all. From February 2008 to December 2009, the Commission studied prevention, wellness and the broader factors that influence good health – conducting site visits, hearing testimony from experts, and issuing 10 recommendations to dramatically improve health for all Americans.

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CDC's Healthy Communities Program Offers Capacity Building Supports

CDC and its partners are working together to create healthy, thriving communities across the United States by reducing chronic diseases and attaining health equity through training, mentorship, dissemination of effective models, and investments in communities that jump-start local change.

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A Framework for Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health

How are we doing — and how can we do better? These are perhaps the most basic questions a community can ask regarding the health of its residents. Yet communities have not been given the necessary tools to answer these questions with validated, consistent measures, evidence-based policies and practices, and incentives for improvement.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have developed a framework for measuring community health and mobilizing community action to address community health issues.  One component of this framework is a set of national County Health Rankings which provide a defined set of health indicators for almost every city and county in the country.  This report from the CDC provides and excellent framework for planning or evaluating a community health improvement initiative.

Read the full report from the CDC...

Using Health Impact Assessment to Optimize Health Care Reform

By Stephen Horan, PhD

What will happen to our community under health care reform?  This is an important question for anyone concerned about the health of their community.  The answer is not simple to produce, but we can start by taking a systematic approach

Health impact assessment (HIA) is a systematic approach for evaluating the potential health effects of a policy or project.  It has been defined as "a flexible, data-driven approach that identifies the health consequences of new policies, and develops practical strategies to enhance their health benefits and minimize adverse effects." (The Health Impact Project).  HIA may involve a variety of research methods including demography, public health research, health services research, health policy research, economic impact analysis, and more.  HIA typically follows a six-step process:

1. Screening - Identify the projects or policies for which an HIA would be useful
2. Scoping - Identify which health effects to consider
3. Assessing Risks and Benefits - Identify which people may be affected, and how
4. Developing Recommendations - Suggest changes to proposals to promote positive impacts and mitigate negative impacts
5. Reporting - Present the results to decision makers
6. Evaluating- Determine the influence of the HIA on the decision process.

At its best, HIA is designed to produce practical answers to important questions posed by people with a stake in the policy or project under study.  If a community were to apply HIA to the health care reform legislation, the study could be designed to answer questions like:

1. Who in our community will be covered under health reform? Who will remain uninsured?
2. How might the health reform legislation affect the health status of our community population?
3. How might the health reform legislation affect peoples' access to health services?
4. How might the health reform legislation affect our local employers and employment?
5. What steps should we be taking at the community level to promote the positive impacts of health care reform, and mitigate any negative impacts?
6. What recommendations should we make to federal and state government to optimize the legislation and regulation?

Questions like these could be generated and refined by a single entity or by a coalition of community stakeholders.  The results could be used to inform policy and practice at the federal, state, and local level.  To learn more about the potential of health impact assessment, visit:

The Centers for Disease Control

The Health Impact Project

The UCLA Clearinghouse

Community Health Solutions