National Public Health Data Resources

The AHRQ Quality Indicators (QIs): The AHRQ Quality Indicators are measures of health care quality that make use of readily available hospital inpatient administrative data. The AHRQ QIs consist of: prevention quality, inpatient quality, patient safety and pediatric quality indicators. Software and user guides are available to assist users in applying the Quality Indicators to their own data.

American FactFinder: Accesses data from the Censuses of Population and Housing, the American Community Survey, and the Economic Census. Users can search Census STF databases, with metadata description, and format the results to create customized tables (or download to spreadsheets), construct reference maps to show boundaries and features for geographic entities, and produce quick thematic maps to reveal geographic patterns in statistical data.

America's Health Rankings: This is an annual assessment of the nation`s health on a state-by-state basis. The rankings are published jointly by United Health Foundation, the American Public Health Association and Partnership for Prevention. It provides state-specific rankings from 1 to 50 across a variety of national health benchmarks.

Anne E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Center: Includes county-level data in addition to city, state, and national data. Has more than 100 indicators of child well-being, including economic status, health, safety, and risk factors. You can also create your own maps, graphs, and charts.

Annual Reviews: Researchers and editors affiliated with Annual Reviews, a nonprofit organization, synthesize and filter critical reviews by leading scientists in 29 focused disciplines within Biological, Medical, Physical and Social Sciences. Public Health is among the disciplines reviewed. Annual Reviews' search feature, and abstracts can be used online by non-subscribers, while the entire article can be only accessed by subscribers.

Catalog of Administrative Data Sources for Neighborhood Indicator Systems (pdf, 47 pages): This catalogue, written in 2008 by the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership of the Urban Institute describes the sources and types of data from administrative agencies that can be used to produce local indicators. Sources are grouped into eight categories: economy, education, health, social services, safety and security, community resources and participation, housing and environment.

CDC WONDER: An online database at the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that has data queries by state, county, age, race and gender on mortality (deaths), cancer incidence, HIV and AIDS, TB, natality (births), census data and other topics. Reports and other query systems are also available. WONDER stands for Wide-ranging OnLine Data for Epidemiologic Research.

Child Trends Data Bank: Has national trends and research data on over 100 key indicators of child and youth well-being including demographic, health, social and emotional development, income-assets and work, education and skills, and family and community.

Community Health Status Indicators: The Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) provides an overview of key health indicators for local communities. The CHSI report contains over 200 measures for each of the 3,141 United States counties.

County Health Rankings - Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health: Compares the overall health of a county, with the health of other counties in the state. Ranking also includes factors that contribute to health, such as health behaviors, quality of health care, and social and economic factors. This resource is from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

Farmer's Market Search: Provides a current, searchable list of farmers' marketsby location, product, and payment type. This resource is put together by the Agricultural Marketing Service of the United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA) .

Federal Interagency Council on Statistical Policy More than 70 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government produce statistics of interest to the public. This site provides easy access to the full range of county- and state-level statistics and information produced by these U.S. government agencies for public use. Among the postings are county level data on immigration, crime, and poverty estimates.

Food Desert Locator: The Food Desert Locator maps food deserts, that is, low-income communities without redy access to healthy and affordable foods. Part of the First Lady's Let's Move Initiative, this site was created by a partnership of three agencies - the Treasury Department, Health and Human Services and the Agriculture Department with staff from the Economic Research Service of the Agriculture Department.

Food Environment Atlas: The Food Environment Atlas maps county-level statisis on a community's ability to access healthy food and its success in doing so by providing data on food choices, health and well-being, and community characteristics. The site was developed and is maintained by the Economic Research Service of the United State Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Health Indicators Warehouse: The Health Indicators Warehouse provides access to data categorized by three associated levels: topic, geography and initiative. Supported by a collaboration of agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Health Indicators Warehouse aims to improve understanding of a community's health status and determinants, and facilitate the prioritization of interventions.

Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP): The Healthcare Cost and Utilization has data related to the cost and quality of health services, medical practice patterns, access to health care programs, and outcomes of treatments at the national, state, and local levels. It was developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

HCUPnet: HCUPnet, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), is a free, on-line query system based on data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP). It provides access to health statistics and information on hospital inpatient and emergency department utilization.

Healthy People 2020: Released on December 2, 2010, the Healthy People 2020 report identifies nearly 600 objectives with more than 1,300 measures unfolding a 10-year agenda to improve the Nation's health. It facilitates this process by establishing benchmarks and monitoring progress over time in order to encourage collaborations across sectors, guiding individuals toward making informed health decisions, and measuring the impact of prevention activities.

Kaiser State Health Facts: A project of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the site provides health data on all 50 states on more than 500 health topics.

National Survey of America's Families The National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) was part of The Urban Institute's Assessing the New Federalism (ANF) multi-year research project. It is a household survey that can be used to produce cross-sectional estimates for a wide variety of child, adult and family well-being indicators at the state level for 13 states and the nation as a whole. Data collection for the NSAF was carried out in 1997, 1999 and 2002 by Westat.

WomensHealth.Gov: Quick Health Data Online, provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Women's Health, includes comprehensive data, for both women and men, from 1998-2004 on a variety of health related topics such as mortality, infectious and chronic diseases, mental health, reproductive health, maternal health, violence and abuse, illness prevention and access to care. You can create tables, graphs, and maps from the data.

Peristats: PeriStats is an interactive perinatal data resource developed by the March of Dimes that provides US, state, county, and city maternal and infant health data.

Return on Educational Investment - A District-by-District Evaluation of U.S. Educational Productivity: The report by the Center for American Progress evaluates the productivity of almost every major school district in the country. It measures the academic achievement a school district produces relative to its educational spending, while controlling for factors outside a district's control, such as cost of living and students in poverty. An interactive map on Return on Educational Investment illustrates how each district performs on the productivity measures.

State of America's Children 2008 Report - Child Health and Health Coverage: The Children's Defense Fund's State of America's Children 2008 report, "Child Health and Health Coverage" provides data on uninsured children (including the race/ethnicity, age, income, family structure, parental status and citizenship breakdown of uninsured children), Medicaid and SCHIP enrollment, mothers who received early prenatal care, low birthweight, infant deaths and immunization.