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CHI Health outlines $66.4M community benefit and priorities for 2026–28
Summary
Ashley Carroll of CHI Health told the Douglas County Board of Health that CHI provided $66.4 million in community benefit statewide in 2025, outlined reasons for a drop in unreimbursed Medicaid costs and described 2026–28 priorities: behavioral health, chronic disease, maternal-child health and social drivers of health.
Ashley Carroll, market director of community and population health for CHI Health, told the Douglas County Board of Health that CHI Health provided $66.4 million in total community benefit across Nebraska in 2025 and that Omaha-metro hospitals contributed roughly $51 million of that amount.
Carroll said enhanced Medicaid reimbursement resulting from the state-directed payment program reduced CHI’s unreimbursed Medicaid costs, which appears in the system’s community-benefit totals as a year‑over‑year decline. "The state-directed payment program is a good thing," she said, "but it diminished the amount of that Medicaid shortfall that we write off as community benefit." She cautioned that other policy changes — notably work requirements in the state’s Medicaid program — could push tens of thousands of people from coverage and change future charity‑care needs.
Carroll laid out CHI’s 2026–2028 community-health priorities: behavioral health, chronic disease, maternal and child health, and actions addressing social drivers of health. She highlighted investment and program details, including a Family Health Center at Immanuel Hospital (68 exam rooms; nearly 1,400 net new patients in its first 12 months), an upcoming centralized nutrition-services facility in North Omaha expected to create about 100 jobs and provide up to 2,800 patient meals daily, and $227,000 invested in community programming addressing mental health and substance use in 2025.
On behavioral health, Carroll described workforce expansion, peer-support staffing and a new hospital-based violence-intervention program at Creighton University Medical Center (CUMC) Bergan Mercy partnered with U-Turn. On chronic disease, CHI is partnering with One World Community Health Center and starting a two-year demonstration that will enroll 80 patients in a medically tailored meal program offering 12 weeks of home‑delivered meals, weekly food boxes and nutrition education.
Carroll also described maternal-and-child-health investments: CHI matched 52 patients with racially concordant doulas in 2025, launched enrollment for a clinical research study of doula-supported care, and started Family Connects, a nurse-home-visitation program that has provided at least one nurse visit to 380 families since its October launch.
On housing and social supports, Carroll reviewed long-standing partnerships: referrals to Together (880 referrals since 2019; 161 referred in 2025), funding for the state’s first medical-respite program (Siena Francis House achieved National Institute for Medical Respite Care certification in 2025), and an earlier $320,000, three‑year investment to launch HEAL Omaha’s street-medicine rounds.
Carroll closed by noting the CHI Health community-health improvement grant program awarded $500,000 in 2025 and that the next request-for-applications opens next month.
What happens next: Carroll offered to answer questions from the board; a brief Q&A followed. The department will continue to track enrollment and community-impact metrics as the state policy environment evolves.
