A new reports says critical health needs in the regions of eastern Pennsylvania served by Lehigh Valley Health Network include increasing mental health concerns, including substance use disorders, increasing costs of medications, lack of healthy food access, poor healthy behavior change and addressing diabetes and obesity rates.

These issues were identified as a priority in LVHN’s 2019 Community Health Needs Assessment, which presents statistics from a variety of local, state and national sources as well as input from community members and LVHN leadership.

The needs assessment report examines the factors that impact the health and wellness of all the people in a particular geographic area.

As part of the Affordable Care Act, starting in 2013, all nonprofit hospitals and health care systems are required to conduct a needs assessment every three years. Beyond its regulatory function, the assessment is an important overview of the current state of health in the region and identifies potential areas of concern which informs LVHN population health management efforts.

The report looks at all of the factors that go into making people in a particular area healthy, including social and environmental factors like employment, education and air quality, individual behaviors like smoking or healthy eating, and the quality and availability of health care in their area.

In addition, the assessment includes an Implementation Plan, which outlines the hospital’s plan to address the needs over the course of the next three years.

The 2019 Implementation Plan will be shared in the fall.

Based on the multiple inputs, the preliminary areas for health improvement in the 2019 CHNA Implementation Plan include:

• Increase capacity to address mental health needs across the continuum from prevention and de-stigmatization to intensive interventions, including addressing drug abuse in the community.

• Increase outreach and community engagement efforts in the community to make community members aware of the resources available to them and to provide health care and prevention services in the places where community members are located.

• Improve the ability of the health care system to respond to the diverse cultural needs of our patients including providing services in languages they understand.

• Improve access to care, by providing services in proximity to where people are living, decreasing the cost of medications, and connecting patients to health insurance.

• Decrease the burden of the social determinants of health (education, employment, housing, etc.) in the community.