NAHQ Updated CPHQ Exam Questions and Answers by koby

Clinical-community partnerships connect healthcare providers with community resources to address social determinants such as housing, food security, and transportation, thereby improving health equity and outcomes (CDC, Addressing Social Determinants of Health, 2023; AHRQ, Community Health Integration, 2023).

Practice transformation and risk stratification are important but less directly target social factors.

Clinical practice guidelines focus on clinical care, not social determinants.

Active surveillance in healthcare is a proactive approach to identifying and monitoring health-related events or diseases123. It involves the continuous, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data needed for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice1.

Option B, “Identifying disease outbreaks through public health contact tracing,” is an example of active surveillance. Contact tracing is a key strategy for preventing the further spread of infectious diseases. It involves identifying people who have an infectious disease (cases) and their contacts (people who may have been exposed) and working with them to interrupt disease transmission12.

Option A, “analyzing laboratory data for disease testing utilization,” could be part of both active and passive surveillance, depending on the context. However, it does not necessarily involve the proactive steps typically associated with active surveillance13.

Option C, “analyzing infectious diseases based on hospital discharge final coding,” is more related to passive surveillance, which involves the collection of data as they become available, or the data that are passively received by health care providers or health information systems13.

Option D, “reporting of infectious diseases data quarterly to local health departments,” is also more related to passive surveillance, as it involves regular reporting of health data from various sources13.

Detailed Explanation:

For a large population, a simple random sample of 400 charts would be sufficient to obtain representative data for statistical analysis:

Option B:Selection of 400 charts using a simple random sampling method

Simple random sampling ensures each patient has an equal chance of selection, providing unbiased and representative results while being more manageable than reviewing all 8,000 records.

Option A: Selection of patients who had a visit during the last month of the year

This could lead to biased results, as it would not be representative of visits throughout the year.

Option C: Selection of 800 patients using a snowball sampling method

Snowball sampling is typically used for hard-to-reach populations and is not appropriate for this scenario.

Option D: Selection of the entire population

Auditing all records would be time-consuming and unnecessary when a statistically valid sample can provide reliable results.

A community health assessment (CHA) is a systematic process to identify the health needs, strengths, and resources of a community, enabling organizations to prioritize interventions and allocate resources effectively. The primary benefit of a CHA is its ability to guide strategic resource allocation to address the most pressing health issues.

Option A (Increasing knowledge about public health within the community): While a CHA may indirectly raise awareness, its primary purpose is to collect data for decision-making, not to educate the community about public health. This is a secondary outcome, not a primary benefit.

Option B (Targeting a neighborhood for a more manageable assessment): Targeting a specific neighborhood may be a methodological choice, but it is not a benefit of the CHA itself. The benefit lies in what the assessment achieves, not how it is scoped.

Option C (Allocating resources to the top opportunities for improvement): This is the correct answer, as CHAs are designed to identify high-priority health needs (e.g., high rates of diabetes or limited access to care) and guide resource allocation to address them. NAHQ CPHQ study materials emphasize that CHAs enable data-driven prioritization, aligning with population health management principles and frameworks like the Triple Aim.

Option D (Improving core measure performance in the organization): Core measures are hospital-specific quality metrics (e.g., CMS or Joint Commission measures), which are not directly tied to community health assessments. CHAs focus on community-wide needs, not organizational performance metrics.