VHHA unveils updated Community Health Legislative Dashboards

The Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association has revamped and updated its online, interactive Community Health Legislative Dashboards tool that enables users to review key population and health statistics by region throughout the Commonwealth. The updated dashboards have an aesthetic redesign and several new features including enhanced mapping, a summary of health care services within the surrounding area of legislative districts, and new food and housing stability metrics in the key health indicators section of the tool. Through the dashboard, users can select Virginia General Assembly members in the House of Delegates or Virginia Senate and review updated demographic data and statistical health markers corresponding to communities overlapping legislative districts.

Information available through the dashboard includes population figures; educational attainment and unemployment rates; local hospital admissions; the amount of charity care local hospitals provide; the number of primary care physicians and health care employees; patient days; live births; food insecurity and housing challenges; data on adult obesity, smoking rates, and premature deaths; local uninsured rates; diabetes monitoring; and mortality rates due to heart disease. For each district, the key health indicators are comparatively measured against other House or Senate districts.

VHHA President and CEO Sean T. Connaughton said the production and online publication of the updated dashboard tool is part of VHHA’s ongoing effort to provide more public insight on health care as the hospital community works with partners and stakeholders toward the goal of making Virginia the healthiest state in the nation.

“The updated Community Health Legislative Dashboards are just one of the publicfacing tools available through www.vhha.com that provide people with additional clarity about health care information,” said Connaughton. “VHHA also supports online tools charting annual community benefit Virginia hospitals provide, patient satisfaction scores, hospital performance on key quality and safety measures, a price comparison portal, and much more. Virginia’s community hospitals are engaged with the public and policy makers in an ongoing conversation about strengthening our health care delivery system to support public health. Tools like the Community Health Legislative Dashboards and others are part of those transparency efforts, and we encourage people to take advantage of these useful tools.”

The dashboard tool is a fixture on VHHA’s website. It gathers data from a host of sources including the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Virginia Health Department, Virginia Health Information, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others.