by America's Health Rankings, 09/05/2023
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.
Nancy Krieger, PhD is a Professor of Social Epidemiology at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor. Dr. Krieger is an award-winning social epidemiologist, recognized internationally and ranked as a 'highly cited scientist', a distinction given to fewer than 0.5% of all researchers.
How has America’s Health Rankings benefitted your work?
My team and I turn to America’s Health Rankings for our work because the data is well-documented, easy to download and verifiable. With America’s Health Rankings, it’s easy to set up datasets that can compare data, given the indicators listed. Moreover, it has a host of not only health metrics, but also socioeconomic and other useful metrics that are critical to contextualizing health at the state level.
In my work as a social epidemiologist, I do a lot of analyses that focus predominantly on census tracts as a unit of geography. Having an easy tool to look at and download reasonably curated state-level data is also very important.
Why is it important to have access to reliable public health data like America’s Health Rankings?
One of the key functions of public health is to monitor health trends over time, particularly to see if health inequities are getting better, if they’re getting worse or if they’re stagnating. America’s Health Rankings is a very useful place to find curated state-by-state data and important indicators to quickly compare states.
For people without the formal skills and training in public health, it’s valuable that the data from America’s Health Rankings are accessible. There’s a real responsibility for people who generate data to make clear the theoretical underpinnings of their data so the public can interpret it correctly and not misinterpret it. That’s why the useful compendium of well-curated data at the state level that America’s Health Rankings puts together is so valuable.
How can the state-level data America’s Health Rankings provide benefit public health research and scholarship?
People have different questions to ask, be it about patterns of exposure, healthcare systems, health policy or the social and economic policies that end up having enormous implications for health. Regardless of the question, there are some variables that can only be measured at the state level.
What’s unique about states is their role in governance in the United States, including the allocation of resources and the distribution of power. Therefore, by accessing reliable state-level data, we can understand state-by-state health outcomes as not just a piece of geography, but a piece of the social fabric.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.