July 2016
Do you work in Community Benefit?
Community Benefit Connect Brings Us Together
Community Benefit Job Analysis
Community Benefit Connect is pleased to announce the launch of a job analysis study for the community benefit profession. A national Task Force will be convened at the end of September to develop the job analysis under the guidance of a psychometrician from Prometric. Prometric is a trusted test development and delivery provider.
The purpose of a job analysis study is to determine the content domains, knowledge, and tasks that should be covered in education and assessment programs for a professional role. The findings from this study will clearly distinguish the unique knowledge, skills and abilities needed to perform in a community benefit role, both now and in the future.
As members of this community, you can play a valuable role in this project by sharing relevant literature and resource documents. Resource documents may include job description, professional standards, or existing core curricula that are relevant to the community benefit profession. These documents will be used to create a broad set of knowledge, skills and abilities, which will be reviewed, refined and validated by a task force of subject matter experts with best practices and credentialing industry standards. If you have references or documents such as those described here, and you are willing to share them for the purposes of this work, please send them to Melissa Biel at mbiel@communitybenefitconnect.org.
We welcome your thoughts, questions or suggestions and we hope you will be active contributors and supporters of this important work for our profession.
National Survey! Community benefit practices to improve community food environments, and reduce risk of diet-related disease.
Health Care Without Harm, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is conducting a survey of tax-exempt hospitals to learn about how hospitals include food insecurity, healthy food access, and diet-related health conditions in their community health needs assessments and community health improvement plans. This is a groundbreaking national survey of potential benefit to CB directors and community health improvement initiatives. If you receive an invitation to complete the brief survey, please do so! Your contribution is vital. Findings will be made available through various learning networks, including CB Connect.
Social Determinants of Health
- A helpful resource document that can help you get started by identifying initiatives, toolkits and campaigns focused on the social determinants of health. Researchers examine the literature and found hundreds of initiatives that address social determinants, a large number with health as a primary goal. Many initiatives began in the health sector, but several were introduced by other sectors and included health as one of several targeted outcomes. Most of these initiatives fell into 6 categories: 1) community-generated initiatives to foster community health; 2) data and metrics initiatives to support measurement of community health; 3) toolkits to promote multisector efforts to promote health; 4) campaigns intended to inspire broad multisector approaches to health; 5) federal initiatives promoting a broad vision for fostering community; 6) philanthropic initiatives supporting and motivating multisector collaboration to improve health.
Koo,D.,P.W. O’Carroll, A. Harris and K.B. DeSalvo. (2016). An environmental scan of recent initiatives incorporating social determinants in public health. National Academy of Medicine, Washington, DC. https://nam.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/An-Environmental-Scan-of-Recent-Initiatives-Incorporating-Social-Determinants-in-Public-Health.pdf
- The American Public Health Association provides some resources on social determinants. They have a nice infographic available. http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/site/misc/socialdeterminants.xhtml
- The focus of Stakeholder Health’s magazine 10 is Hospitals and Social Drivers of Health. Community Benefit Connect advisors, Eileen Barsi and Dora Barilla contribute to an article on how hospitals can impact the social drivers of health (page 7). There are links to social determinants of health resources on page 21. http://3jpmf22xh0bh1bvgrl3wrr8r.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Social-Drivers.pdf
- Research from RAND finds a connection between social spending and better health:
- Higher levels of social spending are strongly associated with better health, and the association is particularly strong for public social spending.
- Spending on old age programs demonstrated the strongest association with better health outcomes, including in unexpected areas, such as infant mortality and low birth rate.
- The association between social spending and better health strengthens over time. http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9900.html
Hilltop Institute Hosts Conference on Community Benefit
Taking Hospital Community Benefit Policy to the Next Level: Advancing Community Health
On June 15, 2016, Hilltop’s 7th invitational symposium brought together over 120 policymakers, researchers, and other key stakeholders from around the country to provoke innovative thinking on advancing community health through hospital community benefit policy. Click here for the program, presentations, and more.
Important Change in IRS Form 990, Schedule H Reporting for 2015
The IRS Form 990 Schedule H instructions have consistently required the reporting of direct offsetting revenue such as: payments from an uncompensated care pool, provider fee, or Medicaid DSH program in the organization’s home state intended primarily to offset the cost of Medicaid services. The 2012 Form 990 Schedule H Instructions state the following: “Net community benefit expense” is “Total community benefit expense” minus “Direct offset revenue.” If the calculated amount is less than zero, report the amount as a negative number. However, the 2015 Schedule H instructions provides different directions regarding negative numbers. The instructions state ” Do no report negative numbers. If the net community benefit expense is less than $0, enter “0”. Similarly, do not report a negative percent in the column labeled Percent of total expense but enter “0”.
Based on this change, it will be important to carefully review the instructions regarding the proper reporting of net community benefit expense, particularly in cases where the number is negative.
Community Benefit Connects thanks Mark Rukavina of Community Health Advisors, LLC for this information.
FREE Webinar
Join Us for Our Next FREE Webinar!
Enhancing Health Literacy to Improve Community Health
July 28, 2016
9 AM PT / 12 NOON EST
One hour duration
Speakers, Tony Collatos, PhD and Doug Leigh, PhD
This webinar has implications for community benefit as it will discuss how access to health literacy impacts the lives of elementary students and their families. Incorporating health literacy into parent support services and education can improve the health of their families, reduce unnecessary ER visits, decrease student absenteeism and caregiver missed work, and improve health self-efficacy.
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