County-level Rural Health Mapping Tool informs rural health strategies

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the research organization NORC, released a Rural Health Mapping Tool to help guide rural communities’ strategies around COVID-19. This tool provides information on COVID-19 vaccination rates, including newly released data on bivalent boosters, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, and other health and sociodemographic information in communities across the United States.

Rural communities and decision-makers can use this vital CDC data to inform ongoing COVID-19 vaccination efforts, particularly those related to encouraging boosters. The tool also enables county-level exploration of data across the United States. In addition, the Rural Health Mapping Tool offers benefits far beyond the pandemic. It integrates several measures of health and prosperity into a single tool, providing a comprehensive picture of the well-being of rural communities.

The tool is the first to display a publicly available county-level map of the NORC-developed prosperity index, which provides a single numerical measure designed to reflect the prosperity of a county, based on 16 indicators. With this new tool, users can observe the associations between the prosperity of a county and a range of health and other factors, including the leading causes of death, sociodemographic factors, and physical environment and access to healthcare indicators.

NORC is an independent research organization at the University of Chicago.

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