The Maine Shared Health Needs Assessment and Planning Process (SHNAPP) Project is a collaborative effort among Maine’s four largest healthcare systems – Central Maine HealthCare, Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems (EMHS), MaineGeneral Health (MGH), MaineHealth – and the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Maine CDC), an office of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services (Maine DHHS). The current collaboration expands upon the OneMaine Health Collaborative created in 2007 as a partnership among EMHS, MGH and MaineHealth. The Maine CDC and other partners joined these entities to develop a public-private partnership in 2012. The four hospital systems and the Maine CDC signed a memorandum of understanding in effect between June 2014 and December 2019 committing resources to the Maine SHNAPP Project.
The overall goal of the Maine SHNAPP is to “turn data into action” by conducting a shared community health improvement planning process for stakeholders across the state. The collaborative assessment and planning effort will ultimately lead to the implementation of comprehensive strategies for community health improvement. As part of the larger project, the Maine SHNAPP has pooled its resources to conduct this Shared Community Health Needs Assessment (Shared CHNA) to inform the community benefit reporting needs of hospitals, support state and local public health accreditation efforts and provide valuable population health assessment data for use in prioritizing and planning for community health improvement.