Big Cities Health Inventory

The Big Cities Health Inventory 2007: The Health of Urban USA provides city-to-city comparisons of leading measures of health, presenting a broad overview of the health of the 54 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. Produced with funding from NACCHO's Metro Forum, this report is the fifth edition of a compendium of health status indicators designed to provide usable information for evidence-based decision making.

To download a free PDF of this publication, visit: http://www.naccho.org/topics/crosscutting/documents/BCHI07COLORFINAL.pdf

From the introduction from NACCHO (National Association of County & City Health Officials):

We are very pleased to release the fifth edition of the Big Cities Health Inventory (BCHI), a compendium of health status indicators produced in a comparative format for the 54 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. This report fills an information gap that, despite great advances in information technology over the past decade, still persists today. Data on the health of our communities are probably more widely available at this time than at any point in the past. The Internet has become a vast repository of statistics on a variety health conditions. But less progress has been made in turning these raw data into usable information, especially for the nation's largest urban areas which face higher rates of poor health status and racial/ethnic disparities in illness and access to health care services.

Several key principles of public health practice depend on having reliable and current information regarding the health status of the community. The most obvious of these principles is evidence-based decision making and the core science of public health, epidemiology, is grounded in the collection and analysis of data.

Perhaps an even more fundamental principle is social justice and the recognition that eliminating health disparities is critical to improving the health of the overall population. For highly diverse urban populations, understanding the root causes of health disparities, including the synergistic interplay of social and environmental stressors that contribute to the erosion of resiliency in many of our nation's urban communities, is necessary to accomplish this goal.