The Health Factor – Using the County Health Rankings to Make Smart Decisions

Challenge Background

Using the recently released County Health Rankings, develop a tool to help people factor community health information into decision-making processes.

The Rankings, for the first time, provide people with a snapshot of a community’s health. This information will help consumers, businesses, investors, government officials, community leaders, social service providers and others make important decisions such as:

  • how to best target resources, services and philanthropic support.
  • how to manage particularly tough budget times.
  • where to locate a business or make an investment, or even where to live.

Currently, when families are moving to a new area, they inquire about the quality of the school system and look at data on average student achievement scores or teacher-student ratios. When businesses are seeking to identify a new location, they assess community characteristics, transportation patterns and the quality of the workforce. How can people, when making these important decisions, factor in the health of a community?

The County Health Rankings are intended to motivate communities to become healthier places for people to live, learn, work and play. To date, we’ve seen communities use the Rankings to bring new partners to the table, to initiate community needs assessments and to raise awareness about health and prevention with the public and policymakers.

In February 2010, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute released the inaugural County Health Rankings, the first project to rank the overall health of nearly every county in all 50 states. The Rankings provide county-level data on both health outcomes (measures of length and quality of life) and health factors (measures of factors that influence health, such as individual behaviors, social and economic factors and quality of clinical care).

Challenge Description

In this challenge, we are looking for innovative approaches that bring the County Health Rankings to the places where people go to get information and data to inform their decisions – decisions that would be better informed by considering a community’s health status.

We invite teams to approach this challenge by creating whatever tools necessary-- widgets, apps or other novel approaches to integrate the Rankings data into smart phone, tablet or web platforms that people already use to inform their decisions. Teams can create a new tool or use an existing one and the tool can target one or multiple decision-makers as long as the final product integrates the Rankings data.

Evaluation Criteria

  • The “tool” appropriately integrates the County Health Rankings into its functionality.
  • The “tool” successfully helps people and communities use the County Health Rankings to inform real-world decisions.
  • The “tool” is user-friendly and visually engaging.
  • The “tool” is launch-ready and could potentially be promoted with the next release of the County Health Rankings in spring 2011.

Terms & Conditions

Expand