We write about state-by-state federal health statistics a lot here, but acknowledge that they can sometimes require basic spreadsheet and database skills, not to mention an understanding of statistics.
That’s where the National Center for Health Statistics Stats of the States pages comes in. It has piles of neatly packaged and ranked PDFs on things like “Kidney Disease Mortality by State” and “Percentage of Births Born Preterm by State,” and it even tidies it all up further by giving each state its own fact sheet full of ranks and numbers.
This is a site for the curious, as well as for folks who just need quick, clean numbers. Data-savvy reporters will already have their own ways of accessing all of this basic information, and would probably rather not deal with the PDF-entrapped numbers anyway. But, for what it is, it does the job nicely.
Related AHCJ tip sheets
Using the Census for health reporting
Finding patterns and trends in health data: Pivot tables in spreadsheets
Looking at Health Indicators by Zip Code
