Plan Development

The development of Healthy Alaskans 2030 was a comprehensive process that utilized Alaska specific data from the State Health Assessment, subject matter experts’ guidance, evidence-based practices, and the Healthy Alaskans teams composed of professionals from across the state. The diagram below has an outline of the process for selecting the priority health topics and objectives contained in the plan:

To develop the statewide health improvement plan, the Healthy Alaskans Core Team conducted a State Health Assessment and an evaluation of the state’s public health system (Community Capacity Review) to identify the most important health issues impacting Alaskans, the health improvement needs of the state, and the areas where the public health system is in need of improvement in order to adequately address the public health needs of the state.

The State Health Assessment report shows data summaries from quantitative health mortality and morbidity data, and qualitative data from Alaskans through an online survey, community listening sessions, and interviews. The Community Capacity Review document indicated which areas, on a public health system level, Alaska needs to improve and which areas we excel. This systems level assessment shows our capacity to adequately respond to and prepare for health conditions, issues, and emergencies.

Health Objective selection work groups conisting of subject matter experts, carefully reviewed and considered the contents of the State Health Assessment, the Community Capacity Review, data trends across the years for specific leading health indicators in the Healthy Alaskans 2020 (HA2020) plan, and annual HA2020 scorecards. These workgroups developed recommendations indicating the need to keep, modify or remove the indicator from the updated state health improvement plan. These recommendations were presented to the Healthy Alaskans Advisory Team, who agreed on an initial set of Leading Health Indicators, which they renamed health objectives and, through a multi-vote prioritization process and extensive work sessions with data and subject matter expert input, narrowed the list down to 30 health objectives within 15 priority health topics.

To prioritize the new health objectives for Healthy Alaskans 2030, the advisory team prioritized if the objective was:

• Understandable to a broad audience
• Possible to obtain accurate and reliable data for the health objective. This means data that comes from established sources, such as the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, the CDC, the U.S. Census,  the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System or other trusted sources.
• Addresses health disparities across all population groups (such as racial, socioeconomic, or gender)
• Relevant and based on the state’s current needs as indicated in the state health assessment and public health system assessment data.

Once the 30 health objectives were selected, HA2030 subject matter expert work groups convened over the period of several months to select targets for each objective and evidence-based strategies and actions for organizations and communities to adopt moving Alaska toward achieving the targets.