information for practice

RAND Health is developing a web-based tool to determine and enhance the usefulness of community health assessments (CHAs) throughout the United States. CHAs identify and describe community health problems, gaps and strengths in services provided, and interventions to improve the health of the community. The authors performed a literature review to identify factors and criteria for a useful CHA process and then examined individual CHA processes throughout the United States to compile common characteristics for use in the development of their Web-based CHA tool.