Community health improvement plan template: A 6-step guide

Key Takeaways

A community health improvement plan is a strategic document that identifies health priorities, sets measurable goals, and outlines action steps to address population health needs in a specific geographic area

PHAB accreditation, IRS 501(r) hospital community benefit requirements, and state health department mandates require organizations to develop and implement a current community health improvement plan

The 6-step CHIP process includes coalition formation, community health assessment, priority setting, strategy development, implementation, and evaluation with stakeholder engagement at every phase

Practice management software like Pabau offers Insights Plus, a paid reporting add-on, to help clinics and health departments monitor population health metrics and measure progress toward CHIP goals across their own locations

Download your free community health improvement plan template

Every health department eventually hits the same wall: the community health assessment is finished, the data holds up, and the report quietly gathers dust while day-to-day operations take back over. A community health improvement plan is what stops that from happening. It turns assessment findings into work with named owners, hard deadlines, and a way to check whether any of it worked.

What is a community health improvement plan?

A community health improvement plan is a collaborative document that names a community’s most pressing health needs and lays out evidence-based strategies to address them, typically over a 3 to 5-year horizon. It grows out of a CHA and CHIP planning process the CDC lays out in detail, and it serves as the operational blueprint for whatever comes next.

A community health assessment focuses on gathering and analyzing data. A community health improvement plan takes it from there: it assigns responsibility, sets timelines, allocates resources, and puts metrics in place to track progress. Local health departments, hospitals, community organizations, government agencies, and residents typically build it together, so the strategies reflect local context and build on what’s already working.

A handful of regulatory and accreditation bodies are why CHIPs get built in the first place:

• The Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) requires a current plan for accreditation.
• The IRS requires nonprofit hospitals to complete a community health needs assessment and implementation strategy every 3 years under Section 501(r).
• Many state health departments require local health departments to keep a current plan on file.

How to write a community health improvement plan: 6 key steps

Developing a strong community health improvement plan takes systematic engagement, not just a working group and a deadline. Follow these six steps to build a plan that reflects community input and drives measurable health improvement.

1. Form a community health coalition. Assemble a diverse coalition of local health departments, hospitals, community health centers, nonprofit organizations, government agencies (education, housing, transportation), faith-based organizations, residents, and business leaders. Define roles and communication protocols early. A shared contact log keeps every partner’s role and reach information in one place once the coalition grows past a handful of organizations.
2. Conduct or review a community health assessment. Gather and analyze primary data (surveys, focus groups, interviews) and secondary data (demographic trends, health statistics, SDOH indicators). Clinical documentation your partners already collect, a constitutional review of systems is one example, can add encounter-level detail to the picture. Assess risk factors, protective factors, and existing community assets, and flag disparities and health equity issues as you go.
3. Identify and prioritize health issues. Review assessment findings and apply prioritization criteria: magnitude of the problem, health impact, modifiability, and alignment with state and national health objectives (e.g., Healthy People 2030). If mental health surfaces as a priority, individual-level tools like a body acceptance worksheet show what your clinical partners might already be using, and where a CHIP strategy can plug in.
4. Develop goals, strategies, and an action plan. For each priority health issue, write SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound), select evidence-based strategies, and detail action steps with responsible parties, timelines, and resources. Many coalitions track this in a simple spreadsheet or matrix alongside the plan, since most templates only leave room for the strategy itself.
5. Implement and communicate. Launch initiatives according to the action plan. Hold regular coalition meetings, share progress updates, and adjust tactics based on early results. Make sure every partner understands their role and has access to the resources they need.
6. Evaluate and update. Track metrics quarterly or semi-annually. Assess implementation fidelity (did we do what we said?) and outcome effectiveness (did our strategies work?). Revise the plan every 3-5 years, or sooner if community needs shift.

NACCHO’s MAPP framework, covered in more detail further down, and the CDC guidance linked above both go deeper into each of these steps than the six-step version here.

Common mistakes that stall a CHIP after the kickoff meeting

A CHIP usually runs into trouble after the kickoff meeting, once the work of actually doing it starts. A handful of mistakes show up again and again:

• No named owner per action step, so tasks default to whoever has time that month, which in practice means nobody.
• Skipping baseline numbers before setting goals, leaving nothing to measure progress against a year later.
• The coalition meets to build the plan, then stops meeting once it’s finalized, so nothing gets reviewed until the next assessment cycle.
• Picking strategies before checking what the budget or grant funding can sustain past the first year.
• Treating the assessment and the plan as one project instead of two, which rushes priority-setting before the data is fully analyzed.

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Who needs a community health improvement plan?

The organizations that need a written CHIP fall into a few clear groups:

• Local health departments in states with a CHIP mandate, who need a current plan to keep operating.
• Agencies pursuing PHAB accreditation, which requires a plan meeting Domain 5 Standard 5.2.
• Nonprofit hospitals completing their IRS 501(r) community health needs assessment and implementation strategy.
• Healthcare systems and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) that want a shared plan to coordinate funding requests and demonstrate impact to funders.
• Primary care and GP practices taking part in a coalition, since population-level goals rely on the data these practices already collect.
• Wellness-focused providers, including wellness practices, contributing prevention-focused strategies alongside clinical partners.
• Community health coalitions that need one shared document everyone can point back to.

What’s included in the community health improvement plan template

Here’s exactly what’s in the download, no more and no less:

• City, state or region, time period, and date
• CHA results, a single open field for your assessment findings
• Planning: goals, objectives, principles, strategies, and interventions, each a plain text box
• Implementation timeline
• Resources required
• Funding sources
• Long-term sustainability plans
• Evaluation: progress, feedback, adjustments, and communication plan

There’s no built-in action plan matrix with columns for responsible party, deadline, and metric, and no separate executive summary, ranked priority list, or stakeholder-roles page. Build those separately, as a companion spreadsheet or slide deck, if your team needs them alongside the plain-text template.

Why social determinants of health belong in your plan

Modern community health improvement plans have to address social determinants of health, the conditions people are born into, live in, work in, and age in. Income, housing, education, food security, transportation, and social support drive an estimated 30 to 50% of health outcomes, and they’re usually behind the disparities a community health assessment turns up in the first place.

Putting that into practice means:

• Folding SDOH data into your community profile section
• Flagging which SDOH factors connect to your top health priorities
• Bringing in sectors outside healthcare, housing, education, workforce development, transportation
• Tracking SDOH-related metrics as part of your evaluation plan

Public health circles sometimes call this cross-sector approach Health in All Policies. It works because it targets the upstream causes behind a problem instead of only treating what shows up downstream.

The MAPP framework: A structured option for bigger planning efforts

NACCHO’s MAPP framework (Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships) is a strategic planning methodology many health departments use to structure CHIP work. It runs on four assessments:

• Community Themes and Strengths (resident and stakeholder input)
• Forces of Change (economic, regulatory, demographic trends)
• Community Health Status (epidemiological data)
• Local Public Health System Performance (capacity and readiness)

Together, these assessments feed into a planning process that produces both a prioritized CHIP and a local public health system improvement plan.

Is MAPP worth the extra process for your team? If you have the staff time and a coalition ready for a multi-month effort, MAPP’s depth pays off, especially for PHAB accreditation. Smaller health departments, or ones with a simpler community context, usually do fine with the basic CHA/CHIP process covered earlier. It takes a lot less overhead to run.

Keeping your CHIP data on track after launch

Once the plan is finalized, the tracking work begins. Health departments and hospital systems need a way to monitor CHIP metrics without rebuilding a spreadsheet every quarter. Insights Plus, Pabau’s paid reporting add-on, gives teams real-time dashboards for key performance indicators and syncs data across an organization’s own practice locations, handy for a health system running its CHIP across several sites.

It won’t pull numbers in from separate, independent partner organizations on the coalition. Each partner still reports its own metrics into the plan, but the add-on cuts down the manual work of pulling your own numbers together for quarterly stakeholder and funder updates.

This kind of visibility helps you catch stalled action items early, keep track of what’s working, and adjust tactics mid-course. It turns a static planning document into something your team keeps open between evaluation cycles, not just at reporting time.

Conclusion

A community health improvement plan only pays off if it moves off the page. Use the six steps here to build yours, keep the coalition meeting after the plan is signed off and not just before, and check your metrics on a set schedule instead of waiting for the next assessment cycle to notice something stalled.

Practice management software like Pabau can help with the operational side, keeping population health data organized so your team can pull CHIP metrics without digging through separate systems. If that would help your organization, schedule a demo with our team to see it in action.

Continue your research

Wondering how community behavioral health billing works? T1040 shows how Medicaid pays community behavioral health clinics for peer support services, a funding detail worth knowing before you finalize your plan’s funding sources section.

Need practical ways to gather community input? Ways to collect feedback walks through five methods practices use to gather patient feedback, several of which translate directly into resident surveys and listening sessions for a CHA.

Looking for a prevention-focused example your primary care partners could use? Annual physical exam checklist gives primary care teams a structured, age-based framework for exam visits, the kind of visit-level data that often feeds a CHIP’s prevention priorities.

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