Get State Health Facts Online

By: Charles Bowen Of all the facts and figures you can gather, health statistics are among the most indicative of our regional differences. Some sections of the country have higher incidences of cancer-related deaths, diabetes, and heart disease, while others lead in health worries such as mental illness, obesity, and tobacco use.

There are a number of Census-related sites that can be mined for specific health data. However, often these sites don't also have the tangential statistics we would like, such as total number of Medicare beneficiaries, number of enrollees in managed care programs, and numbers related to hospital services such as outpatient care and home health visits.

But there is good news for your health and medicine reporters. A new online resource provided by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation discloses important health and health-policy information for all 50 states and U.S. territories. The data are divided into categories including demographics and the economy, health status, health coverage and uninsured, Medicaid and CHIP, Medicare, health costs and budgets, managed care and health insurance, providers and service use, women's health, minority health, and HIV/AIDS.

And the material is easy to explore and display as tables, rankings, graphs, or color-coded maps. You can access individual state profiles and then compare them with other states, or start with an examination of the United States as a whole.

To get started, visit the state, called State Health Facts Online, at http://www.statehealthfacts.kff.org/cgi-bin/healthfacts.cgi?, where a nicely compact introductory page provides quick access to the site's two most popular functions:

* 50-State Comparisons. Simply click on a topic from a highlighted list.

* Individual State Profiles. Click a state on a hyperlinked map to get information on that specific state and data on how it compares to the U.S. as a whole.

For a different view of the data, click on the "Resources" tab at the top of any page in the site. On the resulting screen you can link to assorted source material used in the compilation of health stats. Of particular interest here is the "Topic List" section which can link you to a complete list of all the categories, subcategories, and topics that are available on the site. Also here are links to more than 40 other Kaiser Family Foundation reports and related resources, a glossary, methodology, and contact information. Or if you want to run your own spreadsheets with the site's statistics, check out the "Raw Data" section of the "Resources" page, which enables you to download database material as delimited text files for off-line use.

Other considerations for using the State Health Facts Online site in your writing and editing:

1. You also can search the entire site. To start, click the "Search" tab at the top of any page and, in the resulting data-entry box, type one or more keywords to search for topics. (The search box also is accessible from the lower left side of the main screen.) In creating your search strategy, don't use the words "and" or "or" in your queries. You can use the plus sign (+) before a keyword to require the word in your search results or use the minus sign (-) before a keyword to exclude the word from your search results. Results are ranked by relevance and provide links directly to 50 State Comparisons.

2. If you regularly cover health and medicine topics for your paper, you might want to sign up for the site's e-mail alert service to be automatically notified when new data is added. To do that, click the "Resources" tab at the top of any page and, on the resulting page, click the "mailing list" link.

3. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which operates the site, is an independent philanthropy that focuses on health care issues. It runs its own research and communications programs. For more on the organization, visit http://www.kff.org.

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