Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association Unveils Four New Interactive Community Health Dashboards Highlighting Hospitals’ Economic Contributions; New Dashboards Correspond to Virginia Communities and Legislative Districts

January 30, 2020

New Community Health Dashboards – Interactive Online Tools that Provides User-Friendly Access to Health and Economic Statistics Sorted by Geographic Regions – Illustrate Hospitals’ Economic Impact by State Legislative Districts and Community Health by Congressional Districts

RICHMOND, VA – The Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association (VHHA) has added new offerings to its roster of online Community Health Legislative Dashboards with the development of four new interactive dashboards on VHHA’s website highlighting the community health and economic contributions hospitals and health systems make throughout the Commonwealth. Two of the new dashboards focus on hospital economic impact in Virginia’s 40 state Senate districts and its 100 House of Delegates districts. Those dashboards enumerate district-level hospital jobs, economic impact, and local health data such as babies delivered, surgeries performed, and patients cared for. Two new Community Health Dashboards provide key health statistics corresponding to communities overlapping Virginia’s 11 congressional districts as well as Virginia’s statewide U.S. Senate districts. Those dashboards provide demographic and population data, health indicators, local hospital listings, and more. They are similar to the Community Health Legislative Dashboards corresponding to the Virginia General Assembly’s legislative districts, which debuted online in 2015.

Visitors to www.VHHA.com can access any of the dashboards. For instance, users of the Community Health Dashboards may select a legislative district and the dashboard will populate itself with information pertaining to the hospitals which serve that district, the number of jobs provided, the volume of patients treated, population information, and statistics related to live births, and health indicators such as food insecurity and housing challenges, adult obesity, smoking rates, premature deaths, local uninsured rates, diabetes monitoring, and mortality rates due to heart disease, and much more.

“Hospitals are leading the way in the work to make Virginia the healthiest state in the nation, in part by taking a quantitative approach to tracking key health measures and community indicators that show successes and opportunities for improvement,” said VHHA President and CEO Sean T. Connaughton. “The addition of new Community Health Dashboards to our existing online inventory of publicly available interactive tools highlights our data-informed commitment to improving health outcomes and to informing and educating the public about health care and the health care delivery system in the Commonwealth.”

Added VHHA Vice President of Analytics David Vaamonde: “We are excited to make these new dashboards public so that health care stakeholders, policymakers, and everyday Virginians can gain greater insight about the important role hospitals plays in making communities prosperous and healthy. The development of public-facing tools and resources to enhance community understanding and discourse around health care issues is a reflection of our dedication to enhancing health and wellness in Virginia.”

The dashboard tools are a fixture on VHHA’s website. They gather 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.

About VHHA: The Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association is an alliance of 110 hospitals and 27 health delivery systems that develops and advocates for sound health care policy in the Commonwealth. Its mission is to achieve excellence in both health care and health. Its vision is through the power of collaboration to be recognized as a driving force behind making Virginia the healthiest state in the nation. Connect with VHHA through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and ISupportVirginiaHospitals.com.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Julian Walker
Vice President of Communications
(804) 297-3193 office
(804) 304-7402 mobile
jtwalker@vhha.com