This post was written by Sarah GiaQuinta, MD, MPH, senior vice president of community impact, Parkview Health.
As the largest not‑for‑profit healthcare system in northeast Indiana, Parkview Health is committed to improving health and inspiring well-being across northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio, and this commitment goes beyond the care that we provide within our facilities. Foundational to Parkview’s mission is reinvesting resources into programs, services and partnerships that ensure that everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, age, gender, income and zip code, has the opportunity to reach their highest health potential. In many ways, our investment in community health is an investment in you.
One of the most important tools guiding this work is our Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA). Conducted every three years, the CHNA helps us identify the most significant health needs in our region and develop strategies to address these needs that align with our mission, expertise and available resources. The CHNA plays a central role in Parkview’s community health strategy and directly informs the design of our community health implementation plans.
How we assess community health needs and what we learned in 2025
The goal of each CHNA is simple: understand the health needs of our communities and create meaningful plans to address them. To do this, we partnered with the Parkview Mirro Center’s Health Services and Informatics (HSIR) team to collect and analyze a wide range of data, including:
- Community surveys
- Focus groups
- Secondary health outcomes data (which can be accessed through the Parkview Health Data Hub)
This year, researchers focused on ensuring that data sets were inclusive of all voices across the communities we serve and gave special consideration to the needs of vulnerable populations through feedback from community and key informants. Once the data was collected and analyzed, the top health needs were shared with community and hospital leaders through interactive sessions to both solicit feedback on health priorities and strategize on ways to address the identified needs.
Across the region, we found commonalities among data with many of the hospitals continuing to see chronic disease, cancer, obesity, access to mental health care services, housing affordability and healthy food access emerge as key community health concerns. Ultimately, each Parkview hospital identified two or three key health priorities to focus on for the upcoming three years (2026-2028). Additionally, new to the process this year, each hospital’s results and plans were presented at a system-wide session during which participants identified common trends across Parkview’s service region. Among all the data presented, one health need emerged as a shared priority across the region: mental health.
Next steps
Over the next few months, community health and hospital leadership are tasked with creating an implementation plan aimed at addressing each of the health needs they identified. These strategic plans include what resources, partnerships, and/or programs should be considered as we work to remove barriers to care and eliminate challenges that many in the region face in their journey to lead healthier lives.
Explore the full reports
If you are interested in reading more about 2025 CHNA, you can access the full reports through this link. Each of these documents offers in-depth information on specific community health feedback and outcomes, the processes behind identifying health priorities, and opportunities for Parkview to partner with local organizations.
