New 2014 County Health Rankings Are Here – How Healthy Is Your County?

A collaborative project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute (UWPHI), the new 2014 County Health Rankings are available today. The Rankings allow each state to see how its counties compare on 29 factors including smoking, high school graduation rates, employment, physical inactivity, access to healthy foods, and much more. An easy to use snapshot, the Rankings continue to show us where we live matters to our health.

After five years of the Rankings, we continue to see significant gaps between the least healthy and healthiest counties. The Rankings show us that people living in the least healthy counties have twice the premature death rates than those living in the healthiest counties. There are also twice as many children living in poverty and teen births in the least healthy counties as in the healthiest counties.

New measures have also been added this year to expand our understanding of what impacts health, including housing, transportation and access to mental health providers.

For the first time, we also have a County Health Rankings Key Findings report that explores national and regional trends, five featured measures—children in poverty, college attendance, preventable hospital stays, smoking, and physical inactivity—influence health; and our new measures.  

This year the Rankings are easier to use than ever with enhanced web features, including state pages with links to relevant resources and a new measuring progress section which helps communities dive even more deeply into how they can take steps to building a culture of health..

To learn more about the 2014 Rankings, join a live webcast at 12:30 p.m. ET today with University of Wisconsin researchers and leaders from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Submit your questions to @RWJF_PubHealth or @CHRankings or follow the conversation at #HealthRankings.