Rapid Needs Assessment Solution Released

Note: The Rapid Needs Assessment Solution was released in March of 2025 and replaces the capabilities of the Community Health Needs Assessment.

Health and Human Services organizations need to collect household-level community health information. During emergencies or public health crises, rapid needs assessments identify urgent community health needs. Health and human services and emergency management professionals use this information to make informed decisions, allocate resources, and evaluate community preparedness. The assessments also help professionals assess whether health and safety interventions are improving over time.

The Rapid Needs Assessment Solution was created to help health organizations collect community information, at the household-level, required for disaster response or health action plans. The solution delivers a set of capabilities that include: planning community health survey areas, collecting survey responses from households, and monitoring key indicators as the assessment occurs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supports a framework for rapid needs assessments called, Community Assessment Public Health Emergency Response (CASPER). The World Health Organization developed this framework which has been adopted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  This framework uses a location-based random sampling methodology to determine which areas should be assessed.  Surveys can then be conducted quickly in these areas and analyzed to determine needs for the entire community.  Understanding where health needs are the greatest helps organizations direct services, funding, and resources to those in need.

Plan survey areas

Typically, a Rapid Needs Assessment, using the CASPER methodology, is accomplished using 30 clusters. In urban areas, census blocks are commonly used as the geographic unit defining the clusters. Among all possible clusters (i.e. census blocks) in a community, 30 are randomly selected after weighting the possibilities by the number of households in each. The Rapid Needs Assessment Solution provides an ArcGIS Pro project with tasks that guide the user through the random cluster selection process.  Census block information for this solution is provided by a layer in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.

Assign teams

After the clusters are selected for the rapid needs assessment, a survey team leader or assessment manager can quickly assign teams to conduct the surveys within the survey areas. Once an area has been assigned in the Rapid Needs Assessment Manager app, an email can be generated to send directly to team members, providing a link to their survey area, information on how many households to interview, and at what interval to survey (according to the CASPER methodology, there is a formula for selecting households to interview at discrete intervals to achieve the desired systematic random sampling).

Conduct needs assessment surveys

Survey team members in the field are no longer tied to a clipboard and pen to collect information. With the digital Rapid Needs Assessment Survey they can use a tablet or smartphone to perform the survey.  When the survey is opened, relevant information identifying their assigned cluster and team is pre-populated on the form. By default, the survey includes common questions provided in the CASPER toolkit.  Since needsassessments are done in different communities for different reasons, there may be a need to add new questions, modify existing questions or remove unnecessary questions. The Rapid NeedsAssessment Survey is fully configurable and can be altered as required.

As surveys are completed in the field, the assessment manager will be able to monitor the progress of the assessment in real-time.

Visualize key metrics

Executives want a high level summary of the demographic and functional needs responses to the survey to understand the patterns of needs within their community.  In addition, visual cues in the dashboard indicate whether the demographics of those surveyed align with the overall make-up of the community, maintaining data-driven insight on issues of health equity. The Rapid Needs Assessment Dashboard allows executives to quickly access this information.

Learn More

For more information about the Rapid Needs Assessment solution, check out the following resources:

• Learn how to deploy, configure and use the solution.
• View a demo video.
• Learn more about ArcGIS Solutions.
• Chat with us on Esri Community.