Community Health Assessment 2025

What We Do

A community health assessment (CHA) is a thorough view of the county’s health status and helps identify factors that could improve or worsen health outcomes. CHAs give health departments and their partners the opportunity to collectively identify health concerns, and the assets and resources needed to address them. CHAs use secondary data from a variety of sources including vital records, large national surveys, hospital data, emergency medical services and others. As part of the Marion County CHA, MCPHD also collects primary data in the form of a large survey from Marion County residents to better understand the health status of residents.

Community Health Assessment

MCPHD’s CSA is referred to as the 2025 Community Health Assessment. This assessment is used to understand the current health status of Indiana’s Marion County community. For this CSA, MCPHD collected quantitative (numeric) data on demographics such as race, ethnicity, age, and sex, as well as information on the health status and behaviors of Marion County residents.

A CHA survey was completed online or via phone by 4,518 residents of Marion County in either English, Spanish, Burmese, Kinyarwanda, or Haitian Creole. Residents who completed the survey were eligible to receive a gift card from a selection of potential vendors. The survey was conducted through an external company, Market Decisions Research, and the survey was advertised through a dedicated website, promotional materials, and a limited amount of radio advertising and interviews. A local marketing company, Buzzworthy Branding, was contracted to design and produce these promotional materials.

These newly collected data are supplemented in this report with data that MCPHD has from other sources, such as birth and death records, hospitalization information and more, to provide a more complete picture of the health of residents of Marion County.

Community Context Assessment (CCA)

This assessment requires collecting qualitative data to understand the experiences of people living in a given community. For the CCA, a team from Indiana University Indianapolis’ Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health collected qualitative (narrative data from conversations) from residents and community partner organizations. Focus groups and key informant interviews were conducted with individuals representing population groups which tend to be smaller and from which not many survey responses came. These interviews and focus groups gathered information on people’s experiences around community strengths and assets, and the built environment.

Community Partner Assessment (CPA)

This assessment is used to understand the capacity and assets of the various CHA partners in a community. The CPA was completed by 73 partners from the Steering and Advisory Committees. Each partner who participated completed an online survey to help understand individual systems, processes and capacities of each organization — as well as how to best work together as a larger network to address identified health issues.

This report is currently being designed and will be posted soon.

CHA Survey Report

This report shows the aggregate results of the nearly 100 survey questions that were asked as part of the CSA. This report compares the 2025 survey results to the previous CHA survey results where possible.

This report is currently being designed and will be posted soon.

CHA Survey Methodology Report

This report, prepared by Market Decisions Research, depicts a thorough examination of the methodology used to collect and weight the CHA survey data.