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.
David Huang, PhD, MPH, CPH, is the Chief of the Health Promotion Statistics branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics and serves as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ primary statistical advisor on the Healthy People initiative. He also serves as a Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service.
Why are reliable data platforms like America’s Health Rankings and Healthy People important?
Efforts like America’s Health Rankings and Healthy People underscore the importance of having high-quality demographic population data for benchmarking, as well as for tracking where we are and where we need to go. I think this is important because it gives folks an opportunity to see areas of success as well as areas where there are opportunities for improvement.
For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated many disparities that exist in this country. I think it’s important to continue to underscore the importance of these data and highlight areas where more data collection is needed for certain populations.
Tell me about the importance of having high-quality health data for Healthy People 2030.
Having reliable, high-quality and publicly available data is critical to the Healthy People initiative. In fact, these criteria were established and included for the current iteration, Healthy People 2030, in the interest of moving towards a more reliable set of data and objectives.
As a statistical agency, the National Center for Health Statistics really sees as part of its mission to collect and report these data so that policies and programs can be better informed, using the most reliable and most accurate publicly available data in the interest of transparency.
How can Healthy People Champions like United Health Foundation help advance health equity initiatives like the Healthy People Goals?
Healthy People Champions can really play a pivotal role in terms of amplifying the importance of data collection — specifically, the importance of collecting data for population groups as it relates to health equity and disparities.
I think Champions are a key part of the stakeholder engagement piece in terms of being able to leverage all the different organizations that are working towards these goals and objectives. Organizations that prioritize and value high-quality data are important to help amplify the message that we need more high-quality data and that these data can be used to help inform policies and programs in the best possible way.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.