How much do you know about the health status of the communities your
office represents?
What can you tell them about how your legislative priorities address
their concerns?
Visit the CHSI web site to check out the health status of counties
within your district. For each of the 3,082 counties in the United
States, you can view and print an easy-to-use, 16-page Community Health
Status Indicators (CHSI) Report. This concise set of indicators
focuses on access to care, leading causes of death, risk factors,
environmental health, and other top measures. The first of its kind,
the CHSI Report allow counties to compare their health status to areas
with similar demographics, the U.S., and Healthy People 2010
www.healthypeople.gov targets.
Health departments, governance boards, community groups, and others
interested in local health improvement have been using the reports for
health improvement planning and benchmarking. You can view other
information, including data sources and definitions, addenda of locally
supplied information, and ideas for using the report.
The recent availability of these reports has prompted a sincere
dialogue at state and local levels about how best to improve the health
status of their residents. When CHSI was initially released, more
than 20,000 users per month were accessing the CHSI website. Many of
the users to date have been non-governmental. We are interested in
knowing more about these users, and how they are applying the data to
their needs.
The CHSI Reports can be developed into an even more powerful tool by:
providing options for jurisdictions to compare themselves with other peer
communities, increasing timeliness and sources of data, adding indicators,
or adding the capability to define other geographic areas. These
enhancements would enable CHSI to serve you and your constituents even
better in the future.
Now that a baseline has been established, there is tremendous value in
updating the reports to track trends in community health status.
The project was sponsored by the Health Resources and Services
Administration, in partnership with the Association of State and
Territorial Health Officials, the National Association of County and City
Health Officials, the Public Health Foundation, and numerous advisors.