Winnebago County Public Health Department

A commitment to fostering a healthy and safe environment for its community

Located in Wisconsin, Winnebago County Health Department has a team of 50 professionals – public health nurses, community health strategists, sanitarians, and dieticians, among others – and faced a common challenge in the sector: managing and communicating performance. 

Public health leaders Heidi Keating, Julia Salomon, and Sarahjean Schluechtermann discuss performance management practices with ClearPoint Strategy co-founder Ted Jackson in our customer interview webinar.

Watch the full panel discussion here!

About Winnebago County Public Health

Winnebago County Public Health is the local health department for Winnebago County, Wisconsin. It runs public health offices in Oshkosh and Neenah. Its vision is healthy people building thriving communities. Its mission is to protect and promote health through services, partnerships, and equitable practices and policies. A nine-member Board of Health, appointed by the County Executive, includes both elected County Board members and citizen representatives. The department publishes its strategic plan (2020) and performance management reports on the county website.

Strategic Structure

Before COVID-19, the department went through a strategic planning process that produced plans for each division and strategies that overlapped. After the pandemic hit, those plans never had the chance to launch.

It worked, but it was very siloed. We are finding out that with ClearPoint, we are breaking down those silos.

The Health Department wanted to improve its strategic planning and execution to better serve its community. It needed a more structured and efficient way to manage its initiatives and performance measures.

The department is structured into six distinct divisions:

• Administrative 
• Communicable Disease
• Environmental Health
• Community Health and Prevention
• Women Infant Children (WIC) and
• Healthy Lifespan

Each division used its own methods, mostly Excel files, to track and manage data. That worked for collecting data, but there was no unified standard for sharing information across divisions. People close to the data could draw their own inferences, but communication stopped there, with no way to share results in a digestible, appealing form. 

Salomon, supervisor of the Administrative Division, where planning and performance management are centralized, describes a time when data was well monitored within divisions but there was no shared space for department-wide analysis. Without a platform to review data together, the department missed cross-divisional insights and recommendations.

There's power in asking somebody who's not doing that work, "What do you see that I may not be seeing?" There was not a space to do that.

Performance Management with ClearPoint Strategy

After the pandemic, the department wanted to improve its strategic planning and management to better address community health challenges. It chose ClearPoint Strategy for its intuitive user interface and features that streamline strategy management.

See an inside the county’s ClearPoint account in our webinar (23:50)!

Highlighted Benefits

ClearPoint has improved the department’s strategic management, streamlined internal operations, and built a more collaborative, data-driven culture:

User-Friendly Navigation

ClearPoint’s user interface lets Winnebago’s team easily reach key modules such as scorecards, reports, and strategic elements, which has made strategic management smoother.

Enhanced Collaboration

Team members can discuss work inside ClearPoint, tagging colleagues in comments on strategic elements and reports. That has changed how the team collaborates, which matters for the iterative nature of strategic planning.

Strategic Alignment

The platform’s scorecards and elements give a consolidated view of all strategy components, such as objectives, measures, and initiatives, so team efforts stay linked to departmental goals.

Efficient Reporting

ClearPoint’s reporting capabilities help the department communicate results and keep internal and external stakeholders informed about progress, achievements, and outcomes.

Performance Management Champions

The county established a role called "Performance Management Champion" in each division. This keeps data management and performance tracking from falling on just a few people and spreads it among those who know their division’s operations.

These Performance Management Champs are embedded in their fields and know which metrics have the most impact and how they align with broader community health goals. That makes them effective at identifying the measures that tell the most compelling stories about the department’s work and outcomes.

ClearPoint helps us focus on what data points tell the story we want to tell others.

Champions also take part in leadership meetings, presenting dashboards and measures from ClearPoint to give a window into their divisions. For staff without direct access to the platform, champions share HTML exports. This gives a more integrated view of performance metrics across the department and adds detail to team discussions that might otherwise stay hidden.

By bringing critical measures into a single platform, the department has surfaced trends and insights that were previously split across divisions. That visibility has been enlightening for the whole team and supports continuous improvement and strategic alignment in pursuit of better community health outcomes.

The Future with ClearPoint Strategy

Adopting ClearPoint was a pivotal shift in how Winnebago County Health Department managed its performance data. ClearPoint broke down silos by providing a shared space where all divisions could visualize and discuss their data. Together with the Performance Management Champions, it built a culture centered on performance. 

Staff across divisions understand their colleagues’ work better, which builds unity and shared purpose. The platform’s ability to highlight data trends helps the department tell a more compelling story that focuses on the metrics that matter most.

A new strategic plan was on the horizon, and after completing a comprehensive Community Health Assessment (CHA), the department planned to use the data to determine priorities and integrate the Community Health Improvement Plans (CHIPs) that follow into the platform. This plan, broader in scope and involving community partners, aims to address community-wide health needs. ClearPoint would visualize this data, align departmental and community efforts, and support data-driven decision-making.

Winnebago County Public Health’s experience shows the value of strategy management tools. Managing and executing operations more effectively has left the department better equipped to serve its community and meet its residents’ evolving health needs. With more coordinated efforts, the team can focus on what matters most: positive public health outcomes.

See how ClearPoint can help you serve your community – Schedule a free demo today!