The Power of Local Data in Action

This post originally appeared on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health Blog.

With the City Health Dashboard, communities across the United States are using data presented on a feature-rich website to create healthier and more equitable communities. Lessons learned will help more community leaders pinpoint local health challenges and close gaps in U.S. cities and neighborhoods.

If you knew children born and raised in one neighborhood of your city tend to live 10, 20 or even 30 years longer than those raised in another, what kinds of questions would you ask?

Local data on social, economic, and health factors can help city planners, policymakers, and community advocates illuminate approaches to such challenges and drive change.

We heard from city leaders that there was a lack of data at the city and neighborhood level clearly showing which factors have the greatest influence on their community’s health and well-being. So we got to work and created the City Health Dashboard. Launched in 2018, the Dashboard integrates city- and neighborhood-level data from multiple national sources, providing 37 measures that address health, such as obesity rates and life expectancy, and conditions that shape health, such as child poverty, unemployment, and residential segregation. The country’s 500 largest cities—those with populations of approximately 66,000 or more—are all represented in the Dashboard, which also includes a rich set of resources to help cities take action to improve health.

For the City Health Dashboard team, our first year exploring the power of local data to understand and improve health was an exciting one, with many lessons learned. We delved into data on the availability of parks and affordable housing, rates of children in poverty and obesity, and other factors that affect health in the nation’s largest cities and towns. Out of this data exploration, we continued to address gaps in data needs, adding new features that make the Dashboard an even more powerful tool for cities and communities working to build a Culture of Health. We are excited to share three things we’ve learned from our first year, and we invite you to explore the Dashboard for yourself.