HealthUp Surveys Congress Heights

A young man checking his phone while riding in public transit.

Tapping into lived experiences to inform health related outreach

The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected marginalized communities, highlighting health disparities in our nation and challenging many to rethink their approach to health care. During this time of reflection, HealthUp sought to collect community-sourced qualitative data to better inform health outreach programs in Congress Heights. With co:census, HealthUp launched a survey and leveraged our analytics dashboard to analyze insights provided by over 100 community members.

A young man putting on a surgical mask in front of a large building.

Curating health programming & education is hard

Health programming & education, particularly as it related to COVID-19, proved to not be as effective as anticipated in Congress Heights. With this realization came the understanding that these programs were aimed at addressing one issue as opposed to overall health and wellness. In order to create programming & education that would help bridge the health disparity gap, both as they relate to COVID-19 and in general, community insight that was not a part of the original programming was needed.

Bridging the health disparity gap, through communication

As the goal was to hear directly from community members, HealthUp partnered with a number of community associations, CBOs, MCOs, and trusted leaders in Wards’ 7 and 8, respectively, to amplify both their co:census SMS survey and web survey. The team leveraged the power of word of mouth marketing through trusted community members and social media marketing to help them collect a more representative sample from the Congress Heights community.

A young woman checking her phone with a smile.

Analyzing, understanding, & visualizing the community's voice

The co:census platform was used to engage 53 people via SMS and our analytics dashboard provided real-time insights based on 192 data points. Our top trends feature highlighted a key insight: almost half of survey respondents prefer to receive and currently get their health information via social media.

Trends from a survey highlighting that a majority of the community prefers to receive health information via social media.

In addition to the insights yielded from our analytics dashboard, our research team put together a comprehensive report for HealthUp; our comprehensive reports are designed to provide a very targeted & rigorous analysis of data, using a cross-sectional approach with both primary and secondary data.

A graphic highlighting Key Initial Insights that was collected though surveys.

Looking ahead

After closing their survey, HealthUp plans to take the survey results & initial report designed by co:census to their partners to discuss next steps. Their vision is to leverage these insights to co-design an outreach program with the Congress Heights community.