Educational Webinars
The Association for Community Health Improvement produces several educational webinars each year. These sessions address a range of topics, including: population health improvement and chronic disease prevention, access to care, community benefit, collaborative strategies, outcomes measurement, and evaluation.
2010 Dates: January 14 | February 18 | April 22 | ...and more to come
2009 Dates: April 16 | May 21 | June 30 & July 9 | July 23 | August 20 | September 17 | October 15 | December date to be announced
Time (unless otherwise noted): 11:00-12:00 (Pacific Time); 12:00-1:00 (MT); 1:00-2:00 (CT); 2:00-3:00 (ET)
Registration Fee: $40 (members) | $80 (non-members)
Registrants receive a confirmation e-mail immediately upon completing the online form. Instructions for connecting to the webinar and the dial-in number are sent to registrants by e-mail two days in advance of the session.
(See descriptions of ACHI's 2008 audio conferences.)
January 14, 2010
Governance Oversight of Community Benefit Policy & Programs
| Lawrence Prybil, PhD, FACHE College of Public Health The University of Iowa Iowa City, IA Read Larry's bio |
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Eileen Barsi Director of Community Benefit Catholic Healthcare West San Francisco, CA Read Eileen's bio |
Managers, directors, and vice presidents of community benefit are charged with designing, implementing, and reporting on their programs. For a truly integrated community benefit program’s success, an increasingly important set of considerations involves the board of trustees’ participation in policy-setting and oversight of hospitals’ and health systems’ community benefit goals and performance metrics. With many mid-level staff seeking guidance on how to “manage up” and help their organizations devote attention to community benefit as a strategic priority, developing governance practices is an important topic.
This session will present findings of unprecedented recent research into community health systems’ governance of community benefit, examining characteristics of “low performing, mid-range, and high-performing” systems. Learn from study author Lawrence Prybil to what extent systems have assigned clear oversight responsibility at the board level, have a formal assessment process, established policies, review performance data, and more.
The research findings will be complemented with an illustrated case example detailing the approach of health system Catholic Healthcare West (CHW). Eileen Barsi of CHW will share how and why their board established policies to guide community benefit program commitments, the nature of the board’s oversight, and the benefits and challenges experienced along the way.
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:
- Articulate the outcomes of Dr. Prybil’s research with CEO and trustees, from Governance in High-Performing Community Health Systems.
- State at least three ways in which high-performing hospital and health system boards can engage effectively in community benefit oversight.
- Understand and articulate why and how one health system engaged their trustees in strategic policy-setting and oversight.
October 15, 2009
Community Benefit Scorecard:
Bridging Community and Health System Goals
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Alice Yoder, RN, MSN Director of Community Health Lancaster General Hospital Lancaster, Pennsylvania Read Alice's bio |
A community benefit scorecard elevates the work of community benefit departments by clearly stating the focus, intent, and accountability of key initiatives.
This presentation will feature one model of a community benefit scorecard, and describe the process for selecting elements of the scorecard. Lancaster General's scorecard includes linkages between community collaboratives, health system strategic planning, and operational goals. Ranges of relative success and a high level index will be explained. Key success factors to developing a scorecard, challenges, and how to obtain internal support will be highlighted.
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:
- State the purpose and function of a community benefit scorecard;
- List at least three critical success factors of building a community benefit scorecard; and
- Use tools to begin their own scorecard.
September 17, 2009
Conducting Successful Community Assessments that Lead to Powerful Outcomes
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Christy Moore Manager of Community Health Improvement The Medical Center Foundation, Inc. Gainesville, Georgia Read Christy's bio |
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Bill Stiles President Stiles Healthcare Strategy, Inc. Chattanooga, Tennessee Read Bill's bio |
This session will present key elements of Healthy Hall’s organization, execution, and use of an assessment for health and broader community improvement. Healthy Hall is an organization of community volunteers and leaders that has guided three community assessment projects in Hall County, Georgia over the past ten years, measuring “health” along nine dimensions: social, physical, emotional, economic, spiritual, aesthetic, occupational, educational and environmental.
Healthy Hall works to complement information that is already available while keeping tabs on specific data tracked in previous assessments. Findings are shared with the community and are available on the Health Hall website(LINK). Healthy Hall also communicates specific areas of concern identified in the assessment to appropriate community groups or organizations for consideration and action.
The presentation will include assessment methodologies, the respective expertise and roles of community partners and of a hired consultant, specific findings that underline the need to focus on disparities reductions, and methods for communicating results in a fashion digestible and usable by the community at large.
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:
- Understand and articulate how to conduct a statistically valid community assessment that is “digestible” to the community at large;
- Identify helpful tools, lessons, and strategies that can be replicated (with tweaking) and used for assessments in other communities;
- Understand and articulate how to use community assessment results to improve the health of the community.
August 20, 2009
Recipe for Developing and Sustaining a Successful Community Benefit Framework
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Michelle Davis, RN Manager, Community Health and Education Lowell General Hospital Lowell, Massachusetts Read Michelle's bio |
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Catherine Rees, MPH Manager of Community Benefit Middlesex Hospital Middletown, Connecticut Read Catherine's bio |
This webinar will highlight the journeys of two hospitals – Lowell General in Massachusetts and Middlesex in Connecticut – to strengthen their community benefit programs by instituting programmatic, governance, executive, managerial, and community communications practices in keeping with an overall strategy.
The presenters will share their “key ingredients” for successfully making community benefit an organizational priority, including board-approved policies and new staff capacity, plans to both get the entire organization involved in community benefit, and to bring together key community partners that share common goals for health and wellness.
This very practical session will illustrate specific actions these health care providers took, their results to date, and their adjustments along the way.
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:
- State specific actions to engage their entire organization (executive leadership, governance, physicians, staff) in community benefit;
- Discuss different staffing and organizational structures for community benefit departments; and
- Apply tools for internal and external community benefit communications.
July 23, 2009
Return on Community Investment (ROCI):
A Model and its Application to a Healthcare Access Program
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Joshua Brinkley, MSHA Project Manager, Finance Access Leadership Ascension Health St. Louis, Missouri Read Josh's bio |
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Cynthia Taueg, DHA, MPH, RN Vice President of Community Health St. John Health Warren, Michigan Read Cynthia's bio |
This webinar will introduce a return on community investment (ROCI) model created by Ascension Health to help demonstrate the value of health access programs operated in conjunction with collaborative local healthcare access organizations.
In Ascension’s case, each partner collaborative organization is uniquely designed based on community needs, leading to variability in the design and the function of each access program. While the staffs of these access programs focus on optimizing day-to-day operations, Ascension Health has committed an access program support team. One role of the Ascension support team is to develop an ROCI model that provides stakeholders with financial benefit information based on their programs.
The model’s development will be discussed in detail, including the research methods, stakeholder identification, benefit calculations, and final presentation of the analysis. To bring it home, presenters will also share a specific case example of the ROCI methodology in action, presented by Detroit-based St. John Health, a member of Ascension Health.
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:
- Discuss the goals of a return on community investment (ROCI) analysis;
- Develop and apply return on community investment (ROCI) methodology and calculations; and
- Create a return on community investment (ROCI) story for their local stakeholders.
Tuesday, June 30 and Thursday, July 9, 2009
Priority Setting for Community Benefit:
A Primer on Matching Community Need and Organizational Effort
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Melissa Biel, DPA, RN Principal, Biel Consulting Long Beach, Calif. Read Melissa's bio |
Priority setting is a critically important and often overlooked step in the community benefit program planning process. Matching expenditures of time and money with community need and organizational capacity to effect meaningful health improvement may be common sense. But programmatic inertia and a desire to address every health issue can sometimes obscure the value of priorities and focus. Reinforced by the advent of IRS Form 990/Schedule H and an economic climate in which charitable dollars may be both relatively scarce and facing high demand, non-profit hospitals have every incentive to establish processes for community benefit priority setting.
In this session, Melissa Biel will establish the community needs assessment as the starting point linking the community benefit plan and program priorities. She will discuss the importance of adopting a formal priority setting process, and share techniques and tools for making it happen. This will include discussion of explicit priority setting criteria, tools and discussion questions to help guide the process, and real case examples from a variety of hospitals.
Learning Objectives:
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:
- State the benefits to the community and the organization of a priority setting process for community benefit programs.
- Understand and apply a variety of methods for setting priorities and targeting resources based on community health needs.
- Select and design community benefit programs that promote positive health behaviors in local communities.
May 21, 2009
Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to Advance Community and Public Health
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John Dubnansky L. Robert Kimball & Associates Pittsburgh, Penna. Read John's bio |
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology offers community health professionals in a variety of organizations new and valuable insights into their world by providing a unique spatial viewpoint on populations and their environments. It provides researchers, planners, hospitals, and public health organizations a new tool with which to collaborate and share information, understand health deficits, and plan policy and programmatic interventions to improve health.
Using GIS, health care, healthy communities, and public health professionals can investigate built and socio-economic environments and better understand their impact on high disease prevalence, vitamin consumption, illness, obesity, medical incidents, and more.
In this presentation, Mr. John Dubnansky will demonstrate the uses and value of GIS with visual demonstrations using sample health data. He will also share information on how HIPAA compliance can be maintained when working with sensitive patient data in the GIS environment. GIS is advanced technology that is growing every day in its application to community and public health. This session will equip participants with up-to-date knowledge and greater clarity on the ways GIS can strengthen their initiatives.
Learning Objectives:
- Learn the basics of GIS technology.
- Understand ways in which GIS can be applied to community and public health using specific examples.
- Discuss how to maintain individual confidentiality when working with sensitive patient data.
- Learn using visual tools.
April 16, 2009
Community Health Status Indicators: Employing a New Tool for Assessments and Planning
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Jennifer Stanley, MA |
Norma Kanarek, PhD |
This webinar will showcase and provide a tour of the newly released Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) containing individualized reports for more than 3,000 counties in the United States. The CHSI online tool provides local and state public health agencies, hospitals, community health centers, community organizations, policymakers, and researchers with unprecedented access to comprehensive and nationally comparable health data. The goal of CHSI is to provide easy-to-understand reports that convey the breadth of public and community health issues, and the uniqueness of local health needs and community assets. It is intended to support local health improvement and needs assessment with data assembled from multiple sources.
County reports present demographics, summary measures of health, preventive services use, estimates of vulnerable populations, birth and death measures, risk factors for premature death, indicators of environmental factors, and health care availability. Plus, every county is matched with peer jurisdictions for comparative analysis and benchmarking of health indicators with similar communities.
(The CHSI Working Group includes: the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Public Health Foundation (PHF), and faculty from Johns Hopkins University (JHU). The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is a funder of the current CHSI dissemination efforts.)
Learning Objectives:
- Identify health status indicators that are available at the county level in the CHSI website
- Identify where to find the reports, peer counties, and downloadable database
- Identify and discuss ways in which this tool can be employed to support needs assessment, priority-setting, and community health action planning
This web page may contain links to sites that are not owned or maintained by the Association for Community Health Improvement (ACHI) or the American Hospital Association (AHA). The views expressed by presenters listed on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of ACHI or AHA.
