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.
Glen Mays, PhD, is a Professor of Health Policy and Chair of the Department of Health Systems, Management & Policy at the University of Colorado School of Public Health, focusing his research on healthcare and public health delivery systems. At the national level, Dr. Mays is the Director of the Systems for Action Research program with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where he strives to improve population health by testing strategies for the delivery and financing of medical care and social services.
How does America’s Health Rankings help you in your work?
As an academic and a health policy researcher, America's Health Rankings is the first resource to go to for understanding the trajectory of health factors in each state. My work falls in the space between research and policy development, so it’s a wonderful resource to look at a broad array of health metrics and know they are vetted, reliable metrics. Moreover, these metrics are multidimensional, so I can get a sense of health dynamics, health outcomes and major drivers of health and wellbeing for any state. This gives me not just an understanding of the health landscape in an individual state, but how that compares to the larger region and the nation.
For example, as an academic who has worked in multiple public university settings, I get called all the time into governors’ offices and state legislature hearings to give advice on future directions for health policy. America’s Health Rankings helps me to provide that kind of advice and guidance in a data-driven fashion.
Why is it important for us to have access to state-by-state public health data?
Health is a complex, multidimensional factor, and every state has a unique constellation of needs, risks and resources they can leverage. Today, if you want to identify actions to improve health systems or health policy, you need to use a data-driven approach — because there is no “one size fits all” solution for the kinds of problems we face.
Rankings have an inherent value because they give you a multidimensional, data-driven view of what’s happening in one state compared to the rest of the country. This enables a very natural identification of priority areas for improvement, identifying areas where policy or health system strengthening could potentially have value in individual state settings.
How does America’s Health Rankings benefit your work as an educator?
As an educator, America’s Health Rankings is an incredibly powerful learning tool for helping all of us better understand the complexities and interplay of issues in public health. So, it’s a powerful teaching and learning resource in the classroom, but also in the broader fields of health professionals, helping them learn about the dynamics of health systems and health policies that are relevant to their work.
America’s Health Rankings is an amazing learning resource — stimulating critical inquiry and helping people to ask questions about what’s driving health dynamics across the country. It also encourages students to think about the steps needed to expand on successes we may see in an individual state across larger parts of the country. From this experience, students raise powerful “what if” experiments about what we can do to improve our nation’s public health.
How do tools like America’s Health Rankings contribute to the goal of health equity?
I think the health equity lens that America’s Health Rankings brings is enormously important. Having reliable data to help us understand and quantify the magnitudes of the disparities which exist and how those change over time and place is incredibly powerful, especially given the politically charged nature of some of these issues around health equity.
I think America’s Health Rankings has helped lead to a much broader and deeper understanding of those issues, including the social, economic and environmental determinants of health. The rankings use reliable data to illuminate those factors inside and outside of the clinic walls, helping advance overall health and wellbeing.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.