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Rural Health Mapping Tool

Stock Photo of Rural Barn with American Flag Roof
An interactive mapping tool to help guide rural communities’ strategies around COVID-19
  • Client
    Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  • Dates
    2022

Problem

A need for local data to inform decisions, particularly in rural communities.

Accurate, up-to-date data is critical when choosing public health strategies that meet a community’s needs. COVID-19 vaccination rates may be influenced by a variety of factors, and it is often challenging to access all relevant data in a single tool.

Solution

Interactive mapping tool that will help guide rural communities’ strategies around COVID-19.

With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), NORC developed the Rural Health Mapping Tool. The publicly available tool provides information on COVID-19 vaccination rates, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, and other health and sociodemographic information in communities across the United States. The Rural Health Mapping Tool has several features that are particularly useful for rural communities.

  • Users can create a map view that displays only the rural counties in the United States, which will highlight areas of need and resources.

  • Every county also has an individual fact sheet, which compares all county-level data to the rest of their state and to the nation.

  • All data included in the tool can be downloaded for free and used by local leaders, decision-makers, researchers, and the public.

Result

The Rural Health Mapping Tool offers benefits beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

The tool 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.

“The Rural Health Mapping Tool will be an invaluable resource for rural communities that are looking for accurate, up-to-date information on COVID-19 so they can choose public health strategies that best meet their needs.”

Director of the NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis

“The Rural Health Mapping Tool will be an invaluable resource for rural communities that are looking for accurate, up-to-date information on COVID-19 so they can choose public health strategies that best meet their needs.”

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