Albany ranks low on Dashboard health measures

A newly released “City Health Dashboard’’ tracks 36 measures affecting health for the 500 largest U.S. cities – those with populations of about 66,000 or more.

In Georgia, 11 cities were measured on factors ranging from education and poverty to their rates of chronic diseases and their walkability.

The report was produced by the New York University School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health.

“What we’ve tried to do is bring together measures of health and drivers of health to motivate change and health improvement,” said Dr. Marc Gourevitch, of NYU School of Medicine.

“A number of education factors are key to producing health later on in life,’’ he said, adding that “poverty is just a huge driver of health outcomes.’’

Unlike some other data reports on the health of places in the United States, the Dashboard is strictly informational and does not try to “rank” cities for better or worse. But a review of several factors studied showed that the cities of Sandy Springs, Roswell and Johns Creek – all in northern Fulton County in the Atlanta suburbs – generally had Georgia’s most favorable scores on the health factors, including low levels of uninsured people and premature deaths.