City Health Dashboard Provides Data and Insights Into Community Health

A partnership between New York University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is providing new insights into community health data in cities and states across the country. The City Health Dashboard aims to make neighborhood level data easily accessible to drive action to improve the nation’s health.

Communities can find it difficult to access data at the census track or city level. The City Health Dashboard aims to simplify and streamline this process to identify health outcomes including the current physical and mental health of a community, and health factors that are driving outcomes in the physical environment. Metrics include social and economic factors, health behaviors and access to medical care.

This data has also been used to evaluate gun violence as a public health crisis, which has been increasing in recent years. In partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, the City Health Dashboard has added new metrics to demonstrate the impact that guns are having on communities: firearm homicides and firearm suicides. These measures mark the first time that CDC-collected death records have been analyzed to the city level for hundreds of cities across the country. Among the findings, the data has shown that four out of every ten gun-related deaths in cities nationally were suicides, an 11 percent increase since 2014. City leaders can move communities in the right direction, and these data can be the first step. Explore new gun violence data for your city on the dashboard.