What is asset mapping and how can it improve health?

Marilu Bintz, MD, MBA, FACS; Vice President of Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin

Asset mapping is part of a community needs assessment. So if an organization wants to get involved with partnering with their community to improve the general health and well-being of the community, really the first step is a community needs assessment. An asset map helps you approach things basically from a philosophy and from a perspective of abundance, rather than a perspective of deprivation. We don’t have this, we don’t have that. Asset mapping helps you really put on paper what are the resources you can leverage to improve the health and well-being of your community. It’s pretty simple. That’s what an asset map is meant to do for you. Sometimes you actually do it in a geographical fashion. So if one portion of your community, for example, has a wonderful concentration of pastors or parish nurses who are really interested in helping the community, you can put that geographically on the map and say “Alright, that’s a focus. That’s a focus that we can spread out into the community.”