Purpose
Access to high quality data improves understanding of a community’s health status and determinants, and facilitates the prioritization of interventions. The purpose of the HIW is to:
- Provide a single, user-friendly, source for national, state, and community health indicators
- Meet needs of multiple population health initiatives
- Facilitate harmonization of indicators across initiatives
- Link indicators with evidence-based interventions
- Serve as the data hub for the HHS Community Health Data Initiative, a flagship HHS open government initiative to release data; encourage innovative application development; and catalyze change to improve community health
Partners
The HIW is a collaboration of many Agencies and Offices within the Department of Health and Human Services. The HIW is maintained by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Data, support and funding are provided by the following:
- Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
- Department of Health and Human Services:
- Office of the Deputy Secretary
- Office of Adolescent Health
- Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
- Office of Minority Health
- Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation
- Health Resources and Services Administration
New partners are expected to be added over time.
HIW v1.0
The first version of the HIW (v1.0) contains the following content and functionalities:
- Pre-constructed national, state, and local level indicators including:
- Healthy People 2020 indicators
- County Health Rankings indicators
- Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) indicators
- Medicare quality and utilization indicators
- Ability to map, chart, graph, and trend indicators (to the extent data allow)
- Links from indicators to evidence-based interventions
- Web services—peer-to-peer/business application capability
- Supporting descriptive indicator definitions, methods, data sources and other descriptive data needed to facilitate appropriate use of indicators
HIW Future Releases
Over time new indicators will be added, and some existing indicators will be modified or dropped from the HIW. We do not anticipate including individual-level data in the future. The process for proposing new indicators or modifying existing indicators will be described in the near future. In addition, as resources permit, new functionalities will be added, such as additional mapping and charting capabilities, and simple analytic tools. Please subscribe to our RSS feed to receive announcements about updates and changes to the HIW.
At the current time there is no set schedule for HIW updates. However, you can subscribe to our RSS feed to receive announcements of modifications and updates to the HIW.
For More Information:
Email us at HealthIndicators@cdc.gov