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.
Georges C. Benjamin, MD serves as Executive Director of the American Public Health Association. He is known as one of the nation’s most influential physician leaders and a passionate advocate on some of the nation’s most pressing public health issues. Prior to his current role, he served as secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
How do you use America’s Health Rankings?
America’s Health Ranking for me is a tool. It’s a tool that I can use because it gives me the relative healthiness of the various States, and I can use it when I’m talking to elected leaders or to my colleagues. It gives me a frame of reference to talk to them. It also tells me a lot about what they do well in terms of improving their health, and whether they still have some things to work on. It’s a very, very important tool.
Why is having data, like America’s Health Rankings, so important for public health leaders?
We in the public health community thrive on data, so having an independent entity to measure the health and wellness of a community, using these metrics, helps us align what we think we know with what the actual facts on the ground are. America’s Health Rankings releases state rankings, which allows us to look at a whole state which is very different from looking at what’s happening at the lower levels of jurisdictions.
How does having access to comprehensive data help to address disparities?
There is value in segmenting data and looking at the microdata that you have.
For example, during COVID, we would have been blinded had we simply only looked at overall hospitalizations and overall death. We wouldn’t have known who was having the problem, but once we saw that communities of color were disproportionately impacted, we were able to reemphasize vaccinations and testing, putting new providers into those communities.
We totally changed the way we responded to the COVID pandemic, because we saw that there were disparities that were occurring. That would not have happened if you hadn’t been measuring the data by race, ethnicity, gender, age, those kinds of things.
What is uniquely helpful about America’s Health Rankings?
Far too many of our data systems are three, four or five years old and then we’re trying to make decisions in the rear. America’s Health Rankings data is timely, and that’s very, very helpful in making timely decisions.
What would you tell other public health professionals about America’s Health Rankings?
I would tell them that America’s Health Rankings is one of the reference books on my bookshelf and I would encourage them to use it as a reference deck. When you’re getting ready to talk to a policy maker, write a program, write a grant or talk to the media, pull that out and look at it from a reference perspective because the data is relatively new. It’s timely and it’s accurate and I think it gives you a perspective of what’s really going on in the community versus someone’s belief of what’s going on in the community.
America’s Health Rankings is an important literary resource for data around the health status of the American population, ranked by state.
What would you want the public to know about America’s Health Rankings?
If you’re the average citizen, then America’s Health Rankings allows you to really engage as an average citizen to better understand what’s going on in the community from a health perspective. It should help guide you to make better informed decisions around improving your own health.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.