Analysis of Community Health Needs Assessment from Rural Kentucky

Rural Kentucky is widely known for its lack of accessible healthcare to its citizens. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law in 2010 with the intent to provide better quality and more affordable healthcare to U.S. citizens, especially in places like rural Kentucky. The ACA has mandated non-profit hospitals use a tool, called the Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA), to fulfill their annual community benefit obligations required under section 501(r) in the ACA. To complete a CHNA we often use surveys or other assessment measures. By using CHNAs, the hospitals and other organizations gain feedback directly from patients to address the biggest problems from their patients’ views. The results of the CHNAs are required by law to be posted online at each hospital organization’s website. However, the ACA does not require any organization to compile results from CHNA surveys though there could be value in aggregating results across different hospitals. In Kentucky, the Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky (CEDIK) helped implement CHNAs in about 30 non-profit hospitals. While each hospital was able to customize their CHNA survey, many of the surveys contained similar or identical measures. The questions on the CHNA surveys used ranged from insurance coverage, to patient satisfaction, to family doctors used, and to coverage programs. For this study, data from each of the CHNA surveys were combined and analyzed to provide a more collective look at the subject of rural Kentucky healthcare. For example, this dataset allowed us to observe the overall hospital satisfaction rate for dozens of rural non-profit hospitals. Of the total respondents, the average satisfaction rate was between ‘satisfied’ and ‘very satisfied.’ As for assistance eligibility, about 33% of respondents were eligible for Medicare, 16% for Medicaid, 6% for Public Housing Assistance, and 14% for SNAP. Also, approximately 30% of respondents had, at one point, delayed healthcare due to lack of money and/or insurance. My poster will include both visual representations and numerical findings of the data. This will enable legislators of Kentucky, who are interested in rural healthcare, to view combined results of patient feedback and see their citizens’ overall viewpoints about their region’s healthcare