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.
Sandro Galea, MD, MPH, DrPH, is a renowned physician, epidemiologist and author. He currently serves as the dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. With over 1,000 scientific journal articles, 70 chapters and 19 books published, Galea is one of the most widely cited scholars in the social sciences focusing on the social causes of health, mental health and trauma.
How has America’s Health Rankings helped you in your work?
America’s Health Rankings really gives us a lens into how different states are doing and how the health of the country is going. Having rankings that look at states and multiple dimensions within states gives us an opportunity to compare what some are doing better than others and helps us to isolate what is going well to the end of promoting health.
I think when you have something like America’s Health Rankings, which has specific dimensions, you can identify which dimensions matter most. It can help point direction for action. It can point through to policy action, and to local or community-based action, which states can then adopt.
How does data like America’s Health Rankings help to address health disparities?
The goal for anybody who’s interested in health should be two things: improve health overall and narrow health gaps. When you recognize that, you fundamentally need the data to illuminate what are the health gaps and what’s causing those health gaps. Through systems like America’s Health Rankings, you can identify what influences health for particular groups and what is holding health back for other groups in a particular context. All of this is to the end of then directing policy. The more data we can apply to help guide that process, the better chance we have of being effective at knowing health gaps and improving health.
Why is actionable, health data important to policymakers?
Responsible elected officials make a real effort to base their decision-making and their policy thinking on data. I think what America’s Health Rankings does is take data that are often obscure and well-known in the academic world but renders them in a way that’s very translatable and understandable outside of health.
Why is it important that people have access to platforms like America’s Health Rankings?
The more people know about health, the better it is for all of us. As a country we have a number of misconceptions about health. Perhaps central among them is that health is something that emerges from our doctor’s office.
Health emerges from the world around us, from our behaviors, from our policies. Having more and more people in the country understand that means we are more likely to support elected officials who will implement relevant policies to advance that. America’s Health Rankings creates visibility for these forces that generate health.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.