History

For more than three decades, Alaska has made the health of its people a top priority through the creation of a State Health Improvement Plan (SHIP).

The first iteration of the plan was published in 1994 as Healthy Alaskans 2000 (HA2000). Healthy Alaskans 2000 presented a plan to assess the health status of Alaskans and identify key actions to be taken based off of the Healthy People 2000’s Priority Health Areas. HA2000 primarily focused on the areas of health promotion, health protection, and preventive services and identified 140 indicators for the state to track.

The following decade Healthy Alaskans 2010 (HA2010) was introduced, and continued to closely follow the federal health improvement plans, Healthy People 2010 and Healthy People 2000 the decade before. This iteration had more funding to support a broader planning effort, which allowed for the creation of the Healthy Alaskans Partnership Council that had over 50 individuals representing state, local and tribal government, health care, non-profits, and academia to create the plan. This planning effort developed over 400 indicators and targets with 23 leading health indicators (LHIs) to track.

HA2010 was established the practice of having one set of targets for the health objectives or LHIs between sub-populations to help address health disparities. However due to the large amount of indicators, the lack of clear strategies or actions to reach the targets and the fact that many did not have a specific data source to measure the indicators, HA2010 was unable to produce a final report. Read more on the archived Healthy Alaskans 2010 website.

Healthy Alaskans 2020 (HA2020), Alaska’s most recent state health improvement was built on the work done by the previous two decades. This iteration of the plan initiated the valuable collaboration between Alaska’s State Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) and Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) which is now the core of the plan. After both received grants from the CDC as part of the National Public Health Improvement Initiative, the partnership was able to establish a clearer and less complex plan that included input from both state and tribal health entities. HA2020 had a smaller set of Leading Health Indicators and focused tracking on only 25 leading health indicators. The plan also utilized the County Health Rankings framework to organize health topics and develop a set of strategies and actions that could be used to implement the plan. HA2020 had more of a focus on implementation than the previous iterations and specifically identified key partners in order to help support the evidence-based strategies and actions embedded in the plan. Healthy Alaskans 2020 had scorecards published annually to measure the leading health indicators and will have a final report produced by 2021. Read more about Healthy Alaskans 2020 on the previous website.

The current iteration is Healthy Alaskans 2030, to learn more about the plans development click here and to see the current priority health topics and objectives click here.