Innovative Emerging Practice in Public Health

Imported article from May 2018.

The newest emerging practice in Public Health for digital community engagement is an innovative collaborative platform found at mygarrettcounty.com. For our rural Appalachian community, this platform is a radical shift away from the traditional bureaucratic process of creating a community health improvement plan led by the local health department. In just ten months we’ve increased awareness exponentially. Stakeholders are not only aware of our local Community Health Improvement Planning process, but nearly 5% of our entire population has actively engaged in formulating components of the next iteration of this plan. Creating a vision for our county and incrementally measuring our progress toward the goals we set together has created a true culture of collaboration in Garrett County.

Transparent dialogue between local health officials, agency stakeholders, and the general public continues to be a key component in improving equity and building capacity. Strategically investing in digital technologies allows people to collaborate more efficiently and work better as a team, which is helping us to achieve our desired outcomes. In the community forum of the adaptive planning tool found at mygarrettcounty.com, individuals have the space to openly discuss issues, concerns and suggest solutions to address what matters to them most. Community feedback on such a large scale has informed measure development and prioritization, marking an important step toward ensuring that measures reflect what is most important. Action groups were created to employ methods that will stimulate sustainable mobilization of the discussions in the forum and actualize strategies for community improvement. Within action groups, multisectoral partners work collectively on a strategy reporting incremental data that ensures responsiveness of the public health network in Garrett County.

With well over 55,000 page views and 1,485 active planning partners in less than ten months, the planning tool has completely changed the way our community conducts strategic health planning.

What’s most exciting is that we get to share this innovation with other communities! Our goal is to foster a culture of innovation in public health and successfully replicate and measure meaningful community engagement across our nation to improve health.

Imported article from May 2018.