Come On, Come On, Do the Localmotion
Everybody’s doing a brand new dance.
It’s the localmotion.
The hit song “Locomotion” performed by Little Eva may have had its moment in 1962, but the localmotion is all the rage in 2016.
Local data is at the top of the priority list for many of the organizations that contact Colorado Health Institute. Requests for regional data, county data and even zip code data are coming in fast and furiously.
And for all those localmotion groupies, a new round of local data was released just today.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2016 County Health Rankings report measures both health factors and health outcomes for the majority of counties in the United States. In Colorado, 60 of our 64 counties are ranked.
Douglas County ranked first for both overall health outcomes and health factors in the 2016 report. Douglas clinched the top spot last year in the health factors category while Pitkin ranked first in outcomes. Counties in the San Luis Valley and Southeastern Colorado rank among the bottom of counties for both categories.
A few indicators are new for this year including insufficient sleep, residential segregation (both non-white/white and black/white) and county level drug overdose death rates. Where do Colorado’s most sleep deprived adults live? Pueblo County, where 33 percent of adults report fewer than seven hours of sleep on average. And if you haven’t yet seen CHI’s mapping of the county-level drug overdose death rates, you can find that here.
The County Health Rankings also provide a tool for identifying areas of strength and areas to explore within communities. For example, Denver County can be proud of their lower than average physical inactivity rate but has work to do on lowering its above average rate of adult smoking.
Check your county’s rankings at www.countyhealthrankings.org.
Here at CHI, the localmotion is always in vogue as with our growing suite of local data products.
Our county level workbook, available here, provides data on more than 50 indicators for each of Colorado’s 64 counties. The workbook includes a page for each county, with county and statewide data published side-by-side for comparison and easy interpretation. Along with county level data, CHI also offers data at the health statistics region with data from each year of the Colorado Health Access Survey for each of Colorado’s 21 Health Statistics Regions. You can download that workbook here.
Interested in taking the data down another level of geography? We released our first zip-code level analysis on uninsurance in the summer of 2015 with an updated analysis released this past December. The analysis delves into how the characteristics of a neighborhood impact the probability that a resident under the age of 65 will lack insurance.
Beginning in fall of 2015, CHI began taking this local data on the road. Our Highway to Health project is an ongoing effort to meet Coloradans in all corners of the state and share our data and analysis. So far, we’ve traveled 2,728 miles. Visit the Highway to Health page to learn where we’ve been, view presentations and request a presentation in your community.
CHI will continue the localmotion in 2016 with plans for additional zip-code level data and a new analysis at the census tract level. Make sure you follow us on Twitter for the latest updates from the CHI team.