Geisinger Launches Regional Health Needs Assessment Affecting Union County Communities

The assessment that determines how Geisinger allocates community health spending across central and northeast Pennsylvania entered a new cycle Wednesday. Geisinger launched its regional Community Health Needs Assessment process, initiating a formal review that IRS Tax Code 501(r) requires tax-exempt hospitals to complete every three years under the Affordable Care Act. The legal obligation carries teeth: failure to comply puts a hospital's tax-exempt status at risk.

Geisinger has jointly conducted the assessment with Evangelical Community Hospital and Allied Services since 2012, contracting the research to Build Community, a woman-owned firm specializing in stakeholder surveys. In the most recently completed cycle, finalized in 2024, the three partners defined Evangelical's service area as 39 zip codes spanning primarily Union and Snyder counties, two rural jurisdictions the Center for Rural Pennsylvania classifies well below the state's 291-residents-per-square-mile threshold for urban designation.

The 2024 findings returned a pattern that aggregate statistics can obscure: disease prevalence across the Central Region tracked close to state and national averages, but death rates from heart disease, diabetes, and lower respiratory disease ran disproportionately higher in parts of the region, consistent with documented access-to-care barriers. The prior cycle identified the same three top priorities as the 2021 assessment: access to care, chronic disease prevention and management, and behavioral health. Ryan McNally, Director of the Miller Center and Community Health Initiatives at Evangelical Community Hospital, and Sheila Packer, the hospital's Manager of Community Health and Wellness, coordinated Evangelical's research and outreach across the Union-Snyder service area in both of those cycles.

The new assessment will draw on hospitalization data, population health statistics, focus groups, targeted stakeholder interviews, and a community-wide survey. Town halls are expected across the service area as data collection advances. Partners including the Union-Snyder Agency on Aging and local federally qualified health centers will be asked to help reach rural residents who face transportation barriers to appointments, a population that prior CHNA documentation flags as consistently under-represented in formal assessment data.

Findings will be compiled into a public report and converted into each hospital's Community Health Improvement Plan, the document that governs community benefit spending, prevention programs, and behavioral health referral pathways for the following three years. For nonprofits and care providers in Union County, the plan has historically served as a baseline for competitive grant applications to regional and state health funders. Federal law requires Geisinger to make the completed report widely available and to document the community benefit expenditures it generates, a provision linking the assessment directly to the organization's tax-exempt accountability. Listening-session dates for the new cycle have not yet been announced.

SUMMARY: Geisinger launched its federally required triennial health assessment; the prior 2024 cycle found death rates from heart disease and diabetes outpacing prevalence trends across the Central Region.

CONTENT:

The assessment that determines how Geisinger allocates community health spending across central and northeast Pennsylvania entered a new cycle Wednesday. Geisinger launched its regional Community Health Needs Assessment process, initiating a formal review that IRS Tax Code 501(r) requires tax-exempt hospitals to complete every three years under the Affordable Care Act. The legal obligation carries real consequence: failure to comply puts a hospital's tax-exempt status at risk.

Geisinger has jointly conducted the assessment with Evangelical Community Hospital and Allied Services since 2012, contracting the research to Build Community, a woman-owned firm specializing in stakeholder surveys. In the most recently completed cycle, finalized in 2024, the three partners defined Evangelical's service area as 39 zip codes spanning primarily Union and Snyder counties, two rural jurisdictions the Center for Rural Pennsylvania classifies well below the state's 291-residents-per-square-mile threshold for urban designation.

The 2024 findings returned a pattern that aggregate statistics can mask: disease prevalence across the Central Region tracked close to state and national averages, but death rates from heart disease, diabetes, and lower respiratory disease ran disproportionately higher across parts of the region, consistent with documented access-to-care barriers. The prior cycle confirmed the same three top priorities as the 2021 assessment: access to care, chronic disease prevention and management, and behavioral health. Ryan McNally, Director of the Miller Center and Community Health Initiatives at Evangelical Community Hospital, and Sheila Packer, the hospital's Manager of Community Health and Wellness, coordinated Evangelical's research and outreach across the Union-Snyder service area in both of those cycles.

The new assessment will draw on hospitalization data, population health statistics, focus groups, targeted stakeholder interviews, and a community-wide survey. Town halls are expected across the service area as data collection advances. Partners including the Union-Snyder Agency on Aging and local federally qualified health centers will be asked to help reach rural residents who face transportation barriers to appointments, a population that prior CHNA documentation flags as consistently under-represented in formal assessment data.

Findings will be compiled into a public report and translated into each hospital's Community Health Improvement Plan, which governs community benefit spending, prevention programs, and behavioral health referral pathways for the following three years. For nonprofits and care providers in Union County, the plan has historically served as a baseline for competitive grant applications to regional and state health funders. Federal law requires Geisinger to make the completed report widely available and to document the community benefit expenditures it generates, a provision that ties the assessment directly to the organization's tax-exempt accountability. Listening-session dates for the new cycle have not yet been announced.