Site Launch: A Better, More Portable CountyHealthRankings.org

Where we live affects our health. That is the clear lesson of County Health Rankings, which we helped launch a year ago. 

The new CountyHealthRankings.org, which launched this morning, offers completely updated statistics, a fresh design, and improved usability. There’s also a mobile-optimized version for iPhones, Blackberries, and Android-based smart phones at m.countyhealthrankings.org.

The site is a product of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the tenacious researchers at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. It is the only tool of its kind that measures the overall health of each county in all 50 states on the multiple factors that influence health.

You can browse the rankings for over 3,000 counties and compare their overall health against other counties in the same state. Each state features color-coded maps that compare each county’s overall health with other counties. For example, you can see how a county is doing compared to national benchmarks in diabetes screening rates or the number of uninsured adults.

I just love the data-focused approach of this site as it clearly confirms the critical role that factors such as education, jobs, income, and environment play in people’s health and longevity.

We’re pretty proud of last year’s release, but this new version sports a number of key improvements.

Better Homepage Map: The homepage of the site has a stylish custom-designed U.S. map that shows the county lines. This reinforces that we’re focused on local information. Small states are now easier to click, too.

Built for Performance: Last year’s report drew a rush of attention, including posts by high-profile bloggers such as Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Over one million pages were accessed within the first 24 hours. The site performed well, but we saw room for improvement. For this year’s release, we enhanced the technical architecture further to help the Drupal-based site stay extremely responsive during high traffic. Specifically, we installed Varnish, a web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind. Varnish stores web pages in memory so the web servers don't have to create the same web page over and over again. The web server only re-creates a page when it is changed. Additionally, Varnish can serve web pages much faster than any application server can, which will significantly accelerate the site’s performance for users as they click around.

Improved User Experience: The folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison spent a lot of time soliciting feedback from users throughout the past year. This led to a careful review of our homepage layout, navigation labels, and information architecture. The site is now easier to navigate and use than ever before.

More Engaging Storytelling: One of my favorite new features is the “Your Stories” section, where you can read about successes and share your own stories. I enjoyed this story by a Baptist pastor in Lincoln County, West Virginia. Motivated by the fact that his county ranked 50th out of 55 counties in health behaviors such as smoking and obesity, he created a weight-loss group at his church. Eighteen parishioners were empowered to lose 250 pounds together in just 11 weeks.

User-Focused Data Portability: In addition to the mobile site, this new version offers a variety of methods to make the site available in whichever format you want.

For instance, you can download the entire national data file.

You can download data files, maps, and summary reports for each state. Here is the downloads page for Florida.

You can access archived rankings for individual states (although year-to-year comparisons are not statistically valid). Here are Florida’s 2010 rankings. This seemingly simple feature presented a bit of a technical challenge that we are pleased to have overcome.

 In a future release, we may offer an API to enable more rapid inclusion of the rankings data in third-party applications. We welcome your thoughts on the usefulness of this proposed feature.

So whether you’re on your desktop or on your phone, your county’s health ranking is always accessible. Take this information wherever you go to take action to improve the health in your community!