This two-day event for new CEOs of MHA-member hospitals provides valuable networking opportunities and covers a variety of topics, including the following. 

• shaping a hospital environment to fulfill your current and future missions
• supporting your hospital’s success through public policy and advocacy    
• engaging with your state legislators, including an in-person visit to the Missouri Capitol
• discussing challenges, leadership development and public engagement
• advancing quality, safety, research and value-based care
• describing data and analytics available through the Hospital Industry Data Institute for better decision-making
• engaging members and workforce development
• creating new revenue streams and value-added services for member hospitals  

“Our member hospital CEOs have told us it is important for them to understand how state government operates and how MHA works with elected officials and various state agencies on their behalf,” said MHA President and CEO Jon D. Doolittle. “We also want to help them network and grow their awareness of the expertise and various solutions we have to offer.” 

Here’s what some of last year’s attendees said about MHA’s new CEO orientation. 

MHA will host an upcoming orientation for new CEOs of member hospitals Feb. 17-18. 

In addition to the new CEO orientation, MHA staff offer in-depth, on-site engagements for hospital leadership teams and can visit member hospitals, upon request. 

MHA is privileged to be part of its member hospitals’ teams and advocate for a health care environment in which hospitals can thrive. Learn more about the value of MHA membership. 

That’s why the Missouri Hospital Association has developed a comprehensive, member-informed strategy to help hospitals build, support and sustain a resilient workforce based on these five pillars. 

• Workforce readiness and pipelines: MHA helps hospitals build a sustainable pipeline of health care professionals and develop long-term career pathways for hospital staff.
• Empowering environment: Members can access strategies that improve engagement, reduce burnout and support employee well-being. 
• Workplace safety: MHA provides guidance to help hospitals create safe, respectful environments where staff can thrive.
• Leadership and professional development: Through training and education, MHA strengthens leaders at every level to better support their teams.  
• Regulatory optimization: MHA helps reduce regulatory burdens that strain staff and provides clear guidance for compliance. 

MHA membership also provides hospitals and health systems with access to advanced data and analytics to better understand trends, benchmark performance and make informed workforce decisions. 

“Data alone can’t solve workforce challenges,” said Jill Williams, MHA’s vice president of workforce development. “That’s why MHA turns insights into action, giving hospitals clear, practical steps to support their people and create environments where caregivers can thrive.” 

MHA supports hospitals in addressing workforce shortages, strengthening recruitment strategies and developing the next generation of health care professionals. Learn more about the value of membership and how MHA is a trusted partner of Missouri’s hospitals. 

Through HIDI, MHA members gain access to a suite of interactive dashboards, benchmarking tools and analytic insights — many offered at no additional cost. These resources help hospitals improve critical aspects of care, including patient safety, maternal health outcomes, operational efficiency and financial sustainability. By transforming raw data into actionable intelligence, HIDI enables leaders to identify trends, anticipate challenges and drive measurable improvement. 

In its latest effort to support hospitals’ evolving needs, MHA and HIDI have launched the Payer Performance Initiative in partnership with Hyve Health. At the center of this initiative is the Vitality Index Payer Scorecard, an innovative tool designed to help hospitals strengthen their payer strategies through clear, data driven insights. 

The scorecard provides hospitals with a comprehensive view of payer performance, enabling leaders to evaluate contract value, identify opportunities for improvement and negotiate more effectively. To accelerate adoption and reduce barriers for members, HIDI is covering the full Hyve setup cost for participating hospitals for the next three years — a significant investment in the financial and operational health of Missouri’s hospital community. 

As health care continues to evolve, MHA and HIDI remain committed to delivering the intelligence hospitals need to navigate change and seize opportunity. By pairing robust data resources with strategic expertise, the association ensures its members are equipped to improve care, strengthen operations and advance the health of the communities they serve. 

Learn more about the value of MHA membership, HIDI’s full suite of analytics tools and how HIDI continues to be a trusted partner for Missouri’s health care leaders now and in the years to come. 

In 2025, MHA provided educational programming to 7,219 hospital team members, health care partners and stakeholders.

One of MHA’s biggest events each year is its convention. Craig L. Leonard, a trustee of NKC Health in North Kansas City, Mo., was one of more than 680 attendees at MHA’s 103rd Annual Convention.

“From the thought-provoking keynote sessions to the powerful networking moments, the MHA Annual Convention reignited my passion for people-centered care. I left inspired, informed and proud to be part of Missouri’s outstanding hospital community,” Leonard said.

To help improve care quality at Missouri’s hospitals, 21 Green Belts and 2 Black Belts were awarded to health care staff through Lean Six Sigma training, and 24 Certifications of Health Care Emergency Preparedness Professionals were presented through education offerings provided by MHA last year.

Additionally, MHA offers training for professional development in many health care-related careers, including nursing and human resources.

Leah McRoberts, BSN, R.N.-BC, a core staff nurse at MU Health Care in Columbia, Mo., attended the From Staff Nurse to Charge Nurse training.

“I've been a nurse for 15 years,” McRoberts said. “I still gained some valuable insight and tools to help me be the best charge nurse for my unit.”

Diane Coletta, a senior vice president of human resources at Compass Health Network, attended MHA’s Health Care Human Resources Conference.

“I love the wealth of knowledge in the room and depth of information provided at this conference. The group size provides an ideal opportunity to network and learn best practices from others,” Coletta said.

MHA also offered these exclusive webinars in 2025.

• DSS-hospital child welfare programming — 689 participants
• Compliance with Patient Safety Structural Measure — 240 participants from 80 hospitals
• ICD-10 Z-Code payer engagement — 474 participants

MHA provides expert-led learning opportunities, peer networking and professional development that strengthen teams and improve care. Learn more about the value of membership and how MHA is a trusted partner of Missouri’s hospitals.

The Missouri Hospital Association represents the interests of Missouri hospitals by advocating for policies that strengthen health care delivery while blocking or delaying harmful proposals.

In addition to directly advocating on hospitals’ behalf, MHA facilitates hospital visits with state senators and representatives, as well as coordinates federal advocacy visits to Washington, D.C.

In 2025, MHA helped coordinate visits from more than 20 state lawmakers and legislative staff to their communities’ hospitals throughout the state. In addition, MHA has facilitated visits from members of Missouri’s congressional delegation.

“Creating opportunities for legislators to speak with hospital staff and tour facilities helps expand the knowledge for all parties involved,” said Mary Beth Luna Wolf, MHA’s vice president of legal and legislative policy. “Hospital staff and leadership better understand the priorities and pressures on that legislator. In turn, lawmakers have time to ask questions and receive answers that help them understand the impact of policy decisions on their constituents. These visits foster stronger relationships, better education and open lines of communication.”

MHA serves as a powerful, unified voice for Missouri’s hospitals and is privileged to be a trusted partner, advocating for a health care environment in which hospitals can thrive. Learn more about the value of membership and how MHA supports advocacy by connecting lawmakers and hospital leaders.

The partnership offers a variety of programs and resources to support pregnant and postpartum patients, as well as newborns. For instance, the HCCH social service team is working to improve encounters with patients by utilizing the Ask Me 5 framework developed by the Missouri Perinatal Quality Collaborative in partnership with MHA. 

HCCH and NKC Health report signs of improvement in maternal care through the partnership. They highlight a critical step forward in the program that has been preventing expectant moms from going without any prenatal care. Since the collaboration began, NKC Health has seen a 37% drop in the number of patients in the rural Northwest Missouri program delivering without any prenatal care. 

“The partnership has created a seamless experience for patients while supporting clinical teams on both ends,” said Robin Hogan, R.N./BSN, HCCH medical clinics director. “Watching this program grow and thrive has been both rewarding and energizing for everyone involved.” 

MHA equips hospital teams with knowledge and tools, like Ask Me 5, that advance high-quality care and, ultimately, improved health outcomes. Learn more about the value of membership and how MHA is a trusted partner of Missouri’s hospitals. 

From advancing public policy that supports hospitals’ missions to creating learning opportunities to improve health and care, MHA remains committed to developing an environment where hospitals thrive and deliver exceptional care.

Advocating for hospitals

In 2025, MHA continued working with state and federal lawmakers and agencies to support policies that strengthen hospitals and allow innovation while blocking or delaying harmful proposals.

At the state level, MHA’s advocacy team supported prior authorization reform and budget initiatives and opposed attempts to undo 340B Drug Pricing Program contract pharmacy protections and other bills that would usher in emergency department staffing requirements. MHA partnered with hospital leaders to encourage and provide testimony on key legislation regarding these issues during the state legislative session. In addition, MHA was a tier-one stakeholder in Missouri’s Rural Health Transformation Program grant application.

At the federal level, MHA staff and hospital leaders also advocated to extend key Medicare payments, delay cuts to Disproportionate Share Hospital program payments and increase the Medicare physician fee schedule. MHA coordinated two federal advocacy visits to Washington, D.C., and facilitated hospital visits with state lawmakers in 2025. Twenty state lawmakers visited eight hospitals and members of Missouri’s congressional delegation also visited eight hospitals.

On the regulatory front, MHA’s staff continue to remove roadblocks in physician credentialing and improve the state’s Time Critical Diagnosis system. MHA and the Hospital Industry Data Institute are using data and stories to make the case for regulatory relief.

Delivering financial value

In 2025, MHA’s advocacy efforts helped direct millions in funding to support Missouri’s hospitals. Federal wage index work with hospital finance teams will increase Medicare payments in Missouri. State advocacy delivered provider tax relief, funds to offset some of the costs associated with behavioral health treatment and boarding, and workforce development. These efforts resulted in the following:

• $151 million in wage index adjustments
• $25 million for inpatient psychiatric care
• $20 million of general revenue for the Federal Reimbursement Allowance (used to partially fund Missouri's Medicaid program)
• $7.5 million for inpatient boarding (including funds for both behavioral health and developmental disabilities)
• $4 million for the Nursing Education Incentive Program (including general revenue and Board of Nursing funds)

Building a resilient workforce

Workforce development remains a top priority for MHA. In 2025, MHA established a broader vision for strategic workforce investments and programs built on these five pillars:

• workforce readiness and pipeline development
• empowering environment
• workplace safety
• leadership and professional development
• regulatory optimization

Thanks to the participation of Missouri’s hospitals, MHA once again developed its annual workforce report.

The 2025 Health Care Career Day drew nearly 15,000 students and 580 counselors and educators who engaged with nine hospitals. MHA’s Preceptor Academy and Clinical Faculty Academy, each held numerous times throughout the year, trained more than 600 participants.

Plus, 44 health care workers graduated from the 22nd Annual Health Care Leadership Series, and 200 individuals attended the Health Care Workforce Innovation Bi-State Summit, a partnership between the Missouri and Kansas hospital associations.

Educating and building trust

As public trust in institutions has declined, MHA is working hard to help policymakers and the public understand the importance of hospitals to their communities. In 2025, MHA launched a statewide #MoHospitalsCare storytelling campaign — featuring 125 hospitals so far.

MHA also is improving transparency by moving community benefit, quality and pricing data to a new hub at MissouriHealthMatters.com, a centralized resource for advocacy and public engagement.

Improving maternal health

MHA leads the Missouri Perinatal Quality Collaborative to improve maternal health outcomes. Fifty-five hospital birthing teams have partnered with the MO PQC, which educated 637 stakeholders through in-person events in 2025.

MO PQC this year launched Ask Me 5 — an initiative encouraging open patient-provider conversations. More than 90 providers have pledged to participate in this program.

Sharing knowledge and fostering innovation

Education and collaboration are core to MHA’s mission. In 2025, MHA delivered educational programming to 7,219 hospital team members, including its Annual Convention, which brought together more than 680 attendees.

In addition, HIDI expanded its data capabilities to deliver member value by implementing new Patient Safety, MO PQC and Hospital Performance Insights dashboards.

HIDI also recently announced its partnership with Hyve Health for the Payer Performance Initiative and a pilot program for the Vitality Index Payer Scorecard, a real-time tool that benchmarks payer performance, identifies friction points and improves transparency in payer relationships. More than 15 hospitals have enrolled in this program.

Why membership matters

MHA is committed to helping hospitals achieve their current and future missions by ensuring our expertise, tools and leadership are focused on today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. Learn more about the value of MHA membership, and read MHA’s 2025 membership impact report.

Across Missouri and the nation, hospitals use community health needs assessments as an integral tool to identify local challenges, engage community partners and develop programs that improve health — both inside and beyond the hospital’s walls.

CHNAs identify care opportunities

To be treated as a nonprofit, hospitals must meet additional requirements including conducting a CHNA every three years and adopting an implementation strategy to meet community health needs identified in the assessment.

A CHNA is more than a regulatory requirement, according to Stephen Njenga, director of quality measurement and population health improvement at the Missouri Hospital Association, as these assessments seek to identify care gaps and opportunities that exist within each community, shaping the health and well-being of people.

“Every community is different because those in the community have varying levels of resources,” Njenga said.

CHNAs can be “eye opening” for hospital and health system leaders as they learn about factors outside of their hospital that can impact or interfere with their patients’ health, added Njenga, who works with Missouri hospitals as they develop their CHNAs.

The role of data in CHNAs

CHNAs are driven by both robust data and community engagement. With support from the Hospital Industry Data Institute, MHA’s data company, Missouri hospitals have access to cutting-edge tools that help identify strategies they can implement to close care gaps.

Two of those platforms include the exploreMOhealth.org website, HIDI’s flagship CHNA platform, and health data on MissouriHealthMatters.com , where hospitals can identify differences in the prevalence of diseases among different population segments, said Mat Reidhead, MHA’s vice president of research and analytics.

MHA and HIDI also offer hospital-specific Determinants of Health Dashboards, “where you can drill down to actual patients who experienced X, Y or Z — both in your health care setting and across any hospital setting in the state,” Reidhead said.

This data allow hospitals to determine what health needs and nonmedical factors are most acute in their communities for various segments of their patient population.

Connecting the data to the people who live, work, play and learn in the communities served by hospitals can provide important context, Njenga added.

Community forums with people who are representative of the hospital’s service area are often used in the CHNA process, ensuring different voices are heard, Njenga said. These individuals can offer insight on whether the presented data reflects real issues. Their firsthand knowledge of local challenges, demographics and available resources is essential.

From assessment to action

One example of how data provided by HIDI and a CHNA came together to benefit Missourians occurred at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. The hospital’s emergency department was seeing high rates of usage among patients experiencing severe behavioral health conditions that were exacerbated by housing instability, Reidhead said.

In response, Barnes-Jewish Hospital launched the Hospital to Housing program as a behavioral health priority area in the hospital’s CHNA. When the hospital partnered with St. Patrick Center and Living in Victory Recovery Sober Living to provide transitional housing to these individuals, emergency department utilization fell by half, resulting in a significant drop in overall health care spending.

The program illustrates how addressing nonmedical needs, like housing, can improve health outcomes, reduce hospital utilization, and according to a formal evaluation conducted by MHA, induce significant savings across the health care system.

While the robust return on investment created by the H2H program is critical to demonstrate when engaging payers and policy makers, the crux of the program is in its transformative effects on human lives, and that’s a beautiful thing that’s hard to quantify, Reidhead said.

At smaller hospitals in Missouri, Njenga has seen similar needs, such as food insecurity, being addressed through CHNAs. For instance, when one hospital identified patients who needed help with meals, staff responded by immediately providing food bags to meet patients’ short-term needs. Then, patients were connected with local food pantries and community resources to ensure they received ongoing access to food.

CHNA resources for hospitals

From CHNA templates to guidance and implementation strategies, MHA’s website offers many resources to assist hospitals with these assessments.

The webpage also includes 10 priority health issues commonly found in CHNAs from Missouri hospitals. They include mental health, substance use, obesity, access to care, diabetes, chronic conditions, affordable health care, the COVID-19 pandemic, heart disease and the unhoused.

In addition, Quality Works, a subsidiary of MHA, can provide hospitals with customized services for CHNAs, including primary and secondary data collection and analysis, facilitation of community input, survey design, writing the assessment and development of an implementation plan.

To learn more, listen to this episode of MHA’s PolicyHuddle podcast as Njenga and Reidhead discuss the tools and processes of successful CHNAs.