Communicating Health Data to Drive Decisions
From 2019 to 2020, I was part of BayCare Health System's Community Benefit team. We implemented, managed, and tracked BayCare's community benefit efforts, like free community health programs, flu vaccine campaigns, and in-kind donations. As a not-for-profit health system, BayCare has to track these initiatives to meet IRS requirements, so our work directly protected the organization's non-profit status.
Most of these initiatives came from the Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA). The IRS requires this assessment every three years. Through the CHNA, a hospital system identifies and prioritizes its community's most significant health needs, using input from community members and public health experts. It then builds a plan to address those needs and makes the findings public.
The CHNA shaped where BayCare invested its community health efforts for years to come. Because of that, the data had to be communicated in a way everyone at the table could understand.
My Role
As [your job title] on the Community Benefit team, I owned the visual storytelling of the CHNA. I designed every presentation, dashboard, and infographic shown to stakeholders and the public.
Survey design: I worked with my team to create the community health surveys, and I reviewed and revised the Spanish versions so they were clear for Spanish-speaking residents.
Data gathering: I partnered with our data analyst, who led the analysis of complex hospital system data. I pulled the most relevant public health data from the health department and worked with the data she shared with me.
Visual design: I turned our findings into dashboards and infographics that hospital leaders, clinicians, board members, other departments, and external partners used to guide our community health efforts.
CHNA conferences: I created data placemats showing the top 10 community health concerns, designed for stakeholders with very different levels of experience and expertise. I also helped facilitate the focus groups where stakeholders discussed the data before voting on priorities.
Our team included a Community Benefit manager, a coordinator, a data analyst, and three community outreach coordinators. We served four counties, so we worked together to cover the fourth.
The Challenge
The CHNA brought together a wide range of stakeholders: hospital leaders, clinicians, board members, other departments, and external partners. Some worked with health data every day. Others had never heard of a CHNA. Some didn't see why certain health issues mattered, and some questioned whether the data could be trusted.
These stakeholders would vote on the health priorities that guided BayCare's community efforts for the next three years, so the stakes were real. If the data was presented poorly, people could misread it, doubt its credibility, or walk away with the wrong message.
On top of that, each data placemat had to fit on a single 11x17 sheet of paper. That meant every chart, number, and label had to earn its place.
How might I present complex health data so that everyone at the table, regardless of their background, could understand it, trust it, and use it to make an informed decision?
Process
Listening to the community
The CHNA needed to reflect how residents actually felt about their health, healthcare, and the resources available to them. That meant getting thousands of people to spend at least 10 minutes on a survey.
We learned that the best places to reach people were places where they were already waiting, like clinics, libraries, community events, and DMVs. When people were already sitting down, they were much more willing to take the time.
We also worked to make the survey accessible to everyone. I reviewed and revised the Spanish version so it was clear for Spanish-speaking residents. For residents with limited literacy, our team sat with them and helped them work through each question, so their voices were still counted.
In the end, we collected at least 1,000 responses in each of the four counties we served, for a total of more than 4,000 community voices.
Gathering the data
To get a full picture of community health, we combined three sources: hospital system data, community survey responses, and public health data from the health department. Our data analyst led the analysis of the hospital data, while I pulled the most relevant health department data and worked with the findings she shared.
Choosing what matters
With thousands of survey responses and data from three different sources, the hardest part was deciding what to leave out. I used four questions to filter the data:
How severe is the issue?
How many people does it affect?
How do our counties compare to state and national averages?
What did residents tell us in the surveys?
When a county's numbers were well above the state or national average, that gap made people stop and ask why.
Anything that didn't stand out, or that fell below the national average, was left out. For data to move people to act, it has to stand out. Including everything would have buried the issues that needed attention most.
Designing the visuals
Even though visual design wasn't in my job title, it was a large part of my work. I designed the CHNA materials using the tools I had: Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and PowerPoint.
Each data placemat was a landscape 11x17 sheet, so every element had to earn its space. To make the data easy to scan and understand, I:
Matched the chart to the data. I used bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts depending on what each data point needed to show, and I used lines, arrows, and dots to guide the reader's eye.
Used illustrations as visual cues. A brain represented mental health, and lungs represented lung cancer, so readers could recognize each topic at a glance, even before reading the text.
Translated the jargon. I rewrote medical and scientific terms in plain language, so stakeholders without a health background could follow the data as easily as the clinicians in the room.
Kept the design on brand, with purpose. Colors followed BayCare's branding, with pops of accent color to emphasize the biggest data points.
Built in credibility. Every infographic cited its sources at the bottom. Stakeholders who questioned the data could see exactly where it came from.
Bringing it to stakeholders
We held four CHNA prioritization conferences, one for each county, with about 100 to 140 stakeholders at each. Attendees sat at round tables of up to 10 people, with a data placemat in front of each person. Every table had a facilitator and a whiteboard to capture highlights, ideas, and questions as the conversation unfolded.
The placemats became conversation starters. As stakeholders reviewed the data, they moved naturally into discussions about their community's health, and those conversations helped them decide which concerns were most pressing. Discussions went in directions the data alone couldn't have predicted:
Mental health: Stakeholders discussed the importance of expanding mental health services.
Alcohol use: They talked about how "social drinking" can normalize drinking too much.
Access to care: They raised access challenges in rural areas, especially for migrant farm workers, and proposed mobile medical buses to reach those communities.
Food insecurity: They noted that anyone can experience food insecurity, and that food and health literacy play a role.
After each conference, I compiled the notes from every table's whiteboard into a single document. This captured the community's ideas alongside the data that sparked them.
Impact
Across four county conferences, roughly 400 to 560 stakeholders reviewed the data placemats, discussed what they saw, and voted on the community's most pressing health concerns. The top three priorities were:
Access to health and social services
Mental and behavioral health
Food and nutrition
These priorities became the foundation of BayCare's implementation strategy and launched many community health initiatives, including:
Access to care: Partnerships with free clinics serving uninsured residents, a medication assistance program that helps people find lower-cost medications, and the BayCare Kids Mobile Medical Clinic, which brings care directly into communities.
Mental and behavioral health: Mental Health First Aid training for community members, a regional anti-stigma campaign, and programs combating loneliness among isolated seniors.
Food and nutrition: School-based food pantries with Feeding Tampa Bay, a community food clinic, and a program I helped start that screens hospital patients for food insecurity and sends those in need home with a two-to-three-day supply of food. I explore that program in my next case study.
Years later, these same three priorities continue to guide BayCare's community health work.
Reflection
This project taught me that data only matters if people can understand it. Clear visuals make complex information approachable, and highlighting the biggest disparities gives people a reason to care and act.
Looking back, I was new and still learning. I didn't know how to advocate for what I needed, and I wasn't yet aware of all the tools that could have helped. Today, with stronger design skills and a deeper toolkit, I would speak up for the resources the work deserved.
What stays with me most is watching hundreds of people come together to talk about their community's health, sparked by data I had helped bring to life. I felt like I was contributing to something bigger than myself. I've been chasing that kind of work, and that feeling, ever since.