About the site
County-level health data, written in plain language.
HealthByCounty is independently published data journalism. We present the public-health statistics that the federal government already collects — life expectancy, uninsured rates, primary-care access, air quality — for every one of America's 3,144 counties.
What HealthByCounty Is
HealthByCounty is a data-journalism site, not a clinical resource. Our purpose is to take county-level health statistics published by the federal government and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are deciding where to move, evaluating healthcare access in a region you're considering, or just want to know how your county stacks up nationally, this site is built for you.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets:County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, CMS NPPES (the federal provider registry), and EPA AirNow air-quality data. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology — including the formula we use to compute composite health scores — is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs HealthByCounty
HealthByCounty is published by the HealthByCounty Editorial Team for the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to ingest public datasets from the CDC, U.S. Census Bureau, EPA, and other federal agencies, then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.
The editorial team documents the methodology for composite scores and rankings across the network, maintains the data-ingestion pipeline, and administers the corrections process. Published statistics are corrected when they do not match the cited source data.
The editorial organization is not a physician, public-health practice, or licensed clinical provider, and HealthByCounty does not present itself as a clinical resource. We do not diagnose, treat, or recommend treatment. We do not publish medical advice. Our role is editorial — present the numbers, respect the underlying confidence intervals, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces carry the same visible organization byline. We do not claim medical, public-health, or independent review without a real dated review receipt.
Why HealthByCounty Exists
HealthByCounty was created to make county health outcomes easier to compare. County Health Rankings & Roadmaps publishes valuable data, but much of it is distributed through spreadsheets and reports. This site gives readers a place to see how a county compares on life expectancy, insurance coverage, and healthcare access — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, schools, environmental risk. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry an explicit page-revision date and are updated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
HealthByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the CDC, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release; for the CHR data, the licensing permits commercial reuse with attribution. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to a state Medicaid portal or to HealthCare.gov for marketplace enrollment — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, treatment recommendations, and unsourced inference. The editorial team maintains the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a YMYL site is not to hide it; the fix is clear authorship, a published methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we provide.
Part of the ByCounty Network
HealthByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@healthbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
By HealthByCounty Editorial Team
Page revised