Rural Assistance Center Maps: The Rural Assistance Center, in conjunction with the University of Missouri’s Center for Applied Research and Environmental Systems, offers scores of U.S. and state-based maps on a range of rural health-related issues. Their maps offer a visual look at healthcare facilities such as rural health centers and critical access hospitals to areas with health provider shortages and a lack of public transportation. The maps can also be customized.
County Health Rankings: New data for 2017. This collaboration between the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is a rich source of data about health at the local level and who is doing what to improve it. Information can be segmented by behavior, clinical care, socioeconomics, and physical environments – showing how and where people live, work and receive care. Track the grantees for story ideas, and dive into data through several links on the site (particularly on this page). Then go even deeper with the data drill-down guide. The site looks at national and local trends regarding mortality and premature death, health related quality of life, as well as factors such as air pollution, smoking rates, obesity and teen births. The data also includes interactive searches and mapping capabilities and the full data set is downloadable.
Infogr.am is a user-friendly, Web-based application for making interactive infographics and charts. It includes a spreadsheet for entering and editing data, or you can import XLS, XLSX and CSV files. You can embed infographics in blog posts or news articles, or save them to your computer.
Visualizing Health provides templates to more effectively display health information with graphs, charts, and images. You are free to duplicate, adapt, and modify images (Creative Commons licensing terms require credit and appropriate link to Vizhealth.org). Visualizing Health is a project of the University of Michigan Center for Health Communications Research and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The goal of Community Commons Maps & Data “to make public data accessible for all, with easy-to-understand visualizations such as maps, reports, charts, dashboards and animations.” Registered users can explore and learn from thousands of geographic information systems (GIS) data layers and tables covering communities across the U.S. It’s run by Advancing the Movement and the Institute for People, Place and Possibilities. Supporters include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kaiser Permanente, Ascension Health, and the YMCA of the USA.