Better Data for Better Health
Resources and tools to advance health equity.
Gathering and sharing accurate data can help communities, policymakers, journalists, and others understand the barriers to health some face and take action to overcome them.
Data helps communities advocate for what they need to improve health—such as housing they can afford, good-paying jobs, clean water, and more.
RWJF supports multiple efforts to provide community leaders and residents with local health data, as well as data about the forces impacting health—from education to transportation to environmental pollution—at the state, county, city, and census tract levels. These data sources help communities identify health challenges, use their resources efficiently, and track progress toward ensuring that health is not just a privilege, but a right for everyone.
Gail Christopher and Alonzo Plough: Advancing Health Data Equity in a Shifting Political Landscape
Two RWJF thought leaders discuss how to meet today’s health data equity challenges and stay hopeful in times of change.
Featured Resource
Life Expectancy: Could where you live influence how long you live?
People living just a few blocks apart may have vastly different opportunities to live a long life. Explore how life expectancy in America compares with life expectancy in your area, and resources to help everyone have the opportunity to live a longer, healthier life.
Featured Datasets
City Health Dashboard
Developed with RWJF support, the City Health Dashboard allows users to see correlations between community-level factors that shape health in cities, such as housing affordability, unemployment, and access to parks.
Congressional District Health Dashboard
Created by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in partnership with RWJF, the Dashboard incorporates more than 40 measures of health along with conditions that affect health for all 435 congressional districts and the District of Columbia.
PLACES
A collaboration of RWJF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the CDC Foundation, PLACES enables users to easily browse data about health for every neighborhood and ZIP code in the United States, based on measures of health.
The SDOH & Place Project
The SDOH Place platform made by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign aims to improve health equity research and support community health by increasing data accessibility.
Child Opportunity Index (COI)
With new data and revised indicators, the Child Opportunity Index (COI) 3.0 measures and maps the quality of resources and neighborhood conditions that matter for childrens' healthy development.
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
The County Health Rankings & Roadmaps show that where we live matters to how long and how well we live. The program measures the health of nearly every county on the multiple factors that impact health.
Related Content
Transforming Public Health Data Systems
RWJF supports a range of projects aimed at modernizing and creating a more equitable public health data infrastructure informed by recommendations from the National Commission to Transform Public Health Data Systems.
Learning and Evaluation
Evaluation is a cornerstone of our approach to philanthropy. We believe deeply in the value of sharing key insights from our grantmaking—what worked, what didn't, and why.
Evidence and Data
We work to expand our nation's evidence base on the many factors which shape health. We recognize that equitable data collection and analysis is necessary to dismantle barriers to health equity.
Information-Sharing Between IRS and Census
4-min read
Surge in Digital Health Information Impacting Wellbeing
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Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Data
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