CHR&R Toolkit for Educators
How to use CHR&R resources for teaching and facilitation
Context
Educators and facilitators use resources from County Health Rankings & Resources (CHR&R) to understand health trends, teach health data interpretation and explore best practices and policy landscapes. These resources have been used in educational settings and curricula as well as applied in outreach, coalition-building, and advocacy work.
If you rely upon — or are considering how to incorporate — CHR&R resources for your education and facilitation work, this toolkit is for you. It provides important information and updates on our resources and ways to stay informed
Educational and facilitation use examples of our work include:
- University curricula, including coursework in public and population health, medicine, nursing, social work, psychology, sociology and criminal justice
- New to Public Health (N2PH) Residency Program for governmental public health professionals
- Training series for rural health system leaders and practitioners doing cross-sector work
Staying up to date
Sign up for our newsletter here. Our newsletter is the best way to learn about CHR&R’s resources and events.
Data
You can explore Health Snapshots for any state or county. If you would like to export Snapshot tools, such as maps and graphs, use the print button on the upper right of the snapshot pages. Within the snapshots, you can download measure-specific trend graphs and maps. To export specific measure descriptions and methods, navigate from the interactive model page and use the print button.
Historically, CHR&R has released new datasets of 90 measures for nearly every county in the nation once a year. In recent years, we have moved outside of this annual cycle to provide updated data when available:
- September 2025: We released updated data for some clinical measures, including primary care physicians and mental health providers.
- November 2025: We updated 12 measures related to county-level mortality.
- March 2026: We released updated data for 34 additional measures.
CHR&R Open Source Project (OSP)
Archived data and measure code can be found at the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps Open Source Project (OSP). This resource includes a pared-down version of the Health Snapshots, archived national datasets going back to 2010, the most recent code we’ve used to calculate measures, an R package (like Tidy Census) to easily bring CHRR data into R, and links to the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps Open Source Community (OSC).
The OSP and the OSC are housed on GitHub. GitHub is an online platform where people store, share and collaborate on code and other digital projects using version control. GitHub enables us to expand our commitment to transparency by making our underlying measure code and data easily accessible to the public.
Our Technical Document provides detailed information about our methodology that may answer your questions.
Model of Health
Many educators and facilitators use our model of health as an organizing framework to communicate what shapes health. In 2025, we debuted the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute (UWPHI)’s Model of Health, which names how power and societal rules shape community conditions for health. On the CHR&R website, explore an interactive version of the model, which allows you to click on each measure to uncover more information about that measure’s description, methodology, sources, and more.
Explore resources to better understand the new model:
- Watch a short video
- Download the overview
- Read What Shapes Health and Equity
- Check out our 2025 report, Building Power for Health and Equity
- Learn how this new model expands on the original County Health Rankings & Roadmaps Model of Health that was developed in 2014, which showed how factors like where we live, learn, work and play influence our health
Evidence – What Works for Health (WWFH)
Educators, practitioners and students rely on What Works for Health (WWFH), CHR&R’s database with over 400 evidence-informed strategies (policies, programs, and system changes) to improve health and equity. Most strategies include an equity analysis, which rates a strategy’s impact on disparities and describes the historical and policy context, as well as root causes of inequity that a strategy is designed to address.
Webinars
CHR&R webinars engage experts from across the country about building health and equity into policy and practice. Our webinars support skills-focused teaching and frequently feature educators and training professionals. Watch recordings of all our webinars here.
Contact Us
We hope this toolkit helps you with your educational and facilitation planning.
If you have further questions, please reach out to us by emailing our General Inbox.