Celebrating 35 Years of America’s Health Rankings
Since 1990, America’s Health Rankings® has provided data and insights into the health and well-being of the nation, each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
For more than three decades, America’s Health Rankings has equipped leaders with the insights they need to improve health in their communities. Over time, the platform has advanced its approach to measuring population health to reflect the evolving understanding of the factors that contribute to health and well-being.
Explore how the platform has adapted to promote data-driven change
Sparking Data-Driven Action by Measuring States’ Health
States play a unique role in improving the health of the people who live there by shaping and delivering public health plans and programs. That’s why America’s Health Rankings gathers state-level data on roughly 250 health measures.
The platform aims to offer decision-makers and advocates a way to understand their state’s health — and to compare it with the health of other states and the nation overall. Each year, leaders look to the platform to assess their progress towards goals and spark conversations about emerging needs.
Executive Director, American Public Health Association
How America’s Health Rankings Measures Health
America’s Health Rankings has always measured health based on the World Health Organization’s definition:
"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."
The first edition of the annual rankings calculated each state’s score by equally weighting their performance on health outcomes and risk factors.
An Evolving Model of Health and the Role of Social Drivers
Since then, the America’s Health Rankings model has adapted to more fully reflect the role that upstream factors — known as social determinants or social drivers of health, which include the socioeconomic and physical conditions where individuals live — play in the health and well-being of individuals and communities.
Today, each state’s ranking score is calculated using 25% health outcomes and 75% drivers of health.
Providing More Actionable Insights: Population- and Topic-Specific Analyses
America’s Health Rankings has evolved to include a wide range of demographic data, helping spotlight the needs of the communities most affected by health challenges by displaying how health varies by race/ethnicity, gender, age, socioeconomic status, disability status and more.
Today, the platform presents disaggregated data and publishes insights that can help identify priority topics. This builds on efforts by publicly available data sources to advance health equity by improving data collection and reporting among all population groups.
Looking to the Future: Collaborating With Leaders in Health to Advance Well-Being
Chief, Health Promotion Statistics Branch, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention / National Center for Health Statistics
As a Healthy People 2030 Champion, America’s Health Rankings provides a roadmap to better understand the health of various populations. Looking forward, the platform aims to serve as a reliable source of data that states can use to see how they compare with Healthy People 2030 goals and other benchmarks. The United Health Foundation is proud to support public health leaders who seek data-driven insights to identify what works to build health, as well as the shortfalls that remain.
Input from the Advisory Committees, which include public health professionals, state health officers, researchers, academics and clinicians, keeps the model responsive to current and emerging public health topics to ensure that America’s Health Rankings is as useful and insightful to these leaders as possible.
Explore 35 Years of Data and the 2024 Annual Report
Professor of Social Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
The 2024 Annual Report reveals several challenges have persisted over time in health outcomes — including rising rates of premature death, obesity, diabetes and mental health challenges — despite notable improvements in many measures of health behaviors, clinical care access and socioeconomic factors in the past decade.
View the 2024 Annual Report to explore 35 years of data, including long-term trends and short-term analyses of measures across the five categories of health — and use the data to spark meaningful conversations to improve health.
Continue Reading the 2024 Annual Report