America’s Health Rankings sat down with leaders in the public health space to discuss how access to actionable data helps them to address key health challenges. To hear the rest of our conversations, watch the full video here.
Brian Castrucci, DrPH, MA, is the President and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, a charitable foundation that creates and invests in bold solutions that improve the health of communities across the nation. Castrucci is an award-winning epidemiologist and public health leader with more than a decade of experience working in health departments across the United States.
How has the de Beaumont Foundation used America’s Health Rankings?
America’s Health Rankings is a great guide to help us understand where different places are with our health. It’s a starting-off point. It’s the data that we need to then make the decisions and the changes that we have to make in order to achieve our best health. We’ve used them to inform our grant-making, to look at outcomes. To see if things are changing. It’s a good, consistent source of data that are helpful to us in our planning and I think should be used more by policymakers to understand where states are relative to other states.
How has this platform been uniquely useful for your work?
There are any number of places where there is a wealth of data. We are not data-short in this nation anymore. But consumable data, actionable data, that’s much harder to find and that’s what America’s Health Rankings gives us. It gives us a very clear place to go, with consistent data to answer the questions we have, to then make change. Because data are not an end of themselves. Data are important for us to make change and to get America as healthy as it can be. Having this source of information that can help us make decisions is something that’s invaluable.
How can these data guide solutions to improve the wellbeing of our communities?
I don’t think we’d want physicians making decisions about our health without data. Could you imagine a physician saying to you, “You have cancer,” and the first question you’d say is, “Where is it?”
“We don’t really know, we’re just going to radiate your whole body and hope we get it.”
That’s a totally unsatisfactory answer, and it should be equally unsatisfactory for our communities. We need the data to make the right diagnosis. You can’t have the right treatment options until you have that right diagnosis.
How has America’s Health Rankings helped to address disparities in healthcare?
Health is the foundation of everything. It’s like the foundation of your house. When it’s cracked, everything else is in jeopardy. What America’s Health Rankings gives us is the landscape of those cracks in our foundation: where they are, how bad they are, and then what we need to do to fix them. America’s Health Rankings gives us data that is operationalizable, that can be mobilized to better health in this nation.
In your own words, how would you describe America’s Health Rankings?
I think for me…America’s Health Rankings is the diagnosis. It’s the data that we need to know where the problems are, and then to track the improvement as we mobilize our resources: it’s the first step. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem in and of itself, but without it you’ll never get to the solution. It’s the critical first step in us solving longstanding health issues in this country that we simply can no longer ignore.
Thanks to America’s Health Rankings, we have the first step.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.