Better Data for Better Health
Resources and tools to advance health equity.
Data are a powerful tool for helping policymakers, advocates, journalists, and others better understand and respond to the drivers of health inequities, identify priorities, and drive action.
Data provides evidence highlighting inequitable gaps in community conditions that allow people to reach their best health—such as stable and affordable homes, jobs, clean air, parks, and other conditions that shape health.
RWJF supports multiple efforts to provide community leaders and residents with local health data, as well as data about the drivers of health at the state, county, city, and census tract levels. These data resources allow communities to uncover health challenges, better target resources, and measure progress toward ensuring that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to achieve their best health.
Funding Opportunity
Local Data for Equitable Communities
This call for proposals invites eligible nonprofit organizations to apply for a grant to collect, analyze, and use data to inform efforts to improve the physical, economic, and social conditions of a place.
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 nutritious foods.
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.
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.
US COVID Atlas
The US Covid Atlas is a free visualization tool, report builder, and community toolkit that connects COVID case data and community indicators across the United States from the beginning of the pandemic.
Child Opportunity Index (COI)
The Child Opportunity Index (COI) 2.0 measures and maps the quality of resources and conditions that matter for children to develop in a healthy way in the neighborhoods where they live.
Congressional District Health Dashboard
Created by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in partnership with RWJF, the Dashboard incorporates 35 measures of health along with conditions that affect health for all 435 congressional districts and the District of Columbia.
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
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Surge in Digital Health Information Impacting Wellbeing
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Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Data
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