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What is the Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI) project?

CHSI LogoCommunity Health Status Reports will be available this summer for your use and the use of others who are interested in improving your community’s health.  A CHSI Report is available on the Web for all 3,141 U.S. counties.

Health officials, local boards of health, and many others, identified a need to update a previous set of easy-to-use and understand CHSI reports released in 2000. The Public Health Foundation (PHF), along with several of its partners, responded to this need.  In addition to PHF, project partners include the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, National Association of County and City Health Officials, National Association of Local Boards of Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Library of Medicine.

States and counties can use this concise set of indicators to check county health status in comparison to Healthy People 2010 targets, compare one's county to peers and the U.S., and characterize the overall health of the county and its citizens to support health planning.

Invaluable resources can be found on the web site to help both lay community members and health experts alike understand, interpret, and use the reports. The Web also has data sources and definitions, instructions for printing and duplicating the reports, and ideas for using the report at the community level.

For more information, please e-mail Jennifer Stanley at chsi@phf.org.

We thank the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for their support of CHSI marketing and evaluation activities.

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History of CHSI

The CHSI Project provides county-level health profiles for communities attempting to monitor and address community health.  The major goal of the CHSI project is to provide value-added, easy to understand, state-of-the-art reports that convey the breadth of public health issues and the uniqueness of local needs and assets.  Initiated in 1998 by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and multiple public and private partners, CHSI provided 1993-1998 health, education, environment, census, and other data for all US counties.  Reports were distributed to every local health agency, and were available via the Internet until 2002 and then by purchase of a CD ROM after that.

In 2005, a group of Federal and private partners reconvened to update and further develop CHSI.   The current partnership includes HRSA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Library of Medicine, the Public Health Foundation, Johns Hopkins University and the Brookings Institution.  Additional partners, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Association of County and City Health Officials, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, and others will be invited to participate.  In addition, CHSI has developed relationships with other significant indicator initiatives, including the National Community Indicators Consortium, the National Infrastructure for Community Statistics, and the Key National Indicators Initiative.

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