About Healthy People 2010

In January 2000, the Department of Health and Human Services launched Healthy People 2010, a comprehensive, nationwide health promotion and disease prevention agenda. Healthy People 2010 contains 467 objectives designed to serve as a framework for improving the health of all people in the United States during the first decade of the 21st century.

Healthy People 2010 builds on similar initiatives pursued over the preceding two decades. Two overarching goals—to increase quality and years of healthy life and to eliminate health disparities—served to guide the development of objectives that would be used to measure progress. Each objective has a target to be achieved by the year 2010. These objectives are organized into 28 focus areas, each representing an important public health area. A selected set of objectives, known as the Leading Health Indicators, was created to help identify sentinel measures of public health, and to encourage wide participation in improving health in the next decade. These indicators were chosen based on their ability to motivate action, the availability of data to measure their progress, and their relevance as broad public health issues.

NCHS is responsible for coordinating the effort to monitor the Nation's progress toward the targets, using data from NCHS data systems as well as many other data sources. National data are gathered from more than 190 different data sources, from more than seven Federal Government Departments (including Health and Human Services, Commerce, Education, Justice, Labor, Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency), and from voluntary and private non-governmental organizations. To the extent appropriate, data for the objectives are provided for subgroups defined by relevant dimensions such as sociodemographic subgroups of the population, health status, or geographic classifications.

Data are made available through DATA2010, an interactive database system accessible through the NCHS web site and the CDC WONDER system. 

Because these objectives are national, not solely Federal, their achievement is dependent in part on the ability of health agencies at all levels of the government and on non-governmental organizations to assess objective progress. To inform that effort, NCHS maintains an online update of the November 2000 publication, Tracking Healthy People 2010. This report includes technical information on general data issues and major data sources, detailed definitions for each objective, and additional resources.

This page last reviewed October 19, 2007