Editorial Standards

Our Editorial Mission

HealthByCounty is a data-journalism site. Our job is to take the public-health statistics that the federal government already publishes — county-by-county health outcomes, healthcare access, air quality — and present them in a form that someone planning a move, comparing places to live, or researching public health trends can actually use. We are not a clinical resource. We do not diagnose, treat, or recommend treatment, and we do not publish medical advice.

Every page on this site is grounded in a primary-source dataset from a U.S. government agency or an academic institute. Where we compute composite scores or rank counties, we publish the underlying formula on our methodology page. Where we draw on AI assistance for prose, we say so on this page and on the page itself.

Who Writes and Edits This Site

HealthByCounty is published by the HealthByCounty Editorial Team. The editorial organization maintains the data pipeline, sets the methodology, and administers corrections. It is not a physician, public-health practitioner, or licensed clinician, and HealthByCounty does not present itself as a clinical resource. Its editorial role is to ensure statistics on this site match the source datasets, ensure prose stays inside what the data supports, and decline to publish anything that strays into medical claim territory.

Long-form features and reported pieces carry an explicit organization byline. We do not describe a page as medically, independently, or professionally reviewed unless a real dated review receipt identifies the qualified reviewer.

Where Our Data Comes From

All county-level statistics on this site come from primary government sources. We do not republish data from third-party aggregators. Our active sources are:

• County Health Rankings & Roadmaps 2025 — published by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Provides life expectancy, poor/fair health rate, uninsured rate, and a composite of health-behavior and clinical-care measures for every U.S. county. We use the most recent annual release.
• CMS NPPES (National Plan and Provider Enumeration System) — the federal registry of licensed health providers. We use it to compute primary-care, mental-health, and dental provider density per 100,000 residents at the county level.
• EPA AirNow / Air Quality System (AQS) — daily PM2.5, PM10, and ozone concentrations rolled up to a county Air Quality Index.

Each source's URL, release date, and pull date are documented on the methodology page. Source datasets are in the public domain (federal works) or published under licenses permitting commercial redistribution with attribution.

How We Use AI

Per-county pages on this site include a short, AI-generated narrative summary that contextualizes the statistics for that county. The narrative is produced by Claude (Anthropic) from the same source data shown in the statistics tables on the page. The editorial team maintains the underlying prompt and spot-checks output before publication; the prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, treatment recommendations, and any prose that goes beyond what the source statistics support.

We do not use AI to:

• Generate medical advice, treatment recommendations, or diagnostic information.
• Invent statistics, sources, or quotes.
• Write methodology, editorial standards, or correction notices.
• Generate cause-and-effect claims about health outcomes that aren't grounded in the source data.

When the underlying data is updated, narratives are regenerated to stay consistent. AI-generated prose is always paired with the source statistics so readers can verify the numbers themselves.

Corrections Policy

If you spot a factual error — a wrong statistic, a misattributed source, a broken citation, an outdated provider count — email editorial@healthbycounty.com with the page URL and the specific issue. We aim to acknowledge every report within five business days and to publish a correction or update the page within ten business days for substantive issues.

Substantive corrections (changes to a statistic, methodology, or claim) are noted in a "Corrections" entry on the page itself with the date of the correction and a short description of what changed. Typographical and formatting fixes are made silently.

How HealthByCounty Is Funded

HealthByCounty is independently owned and operated. It is part of the ByCounty Network of data sites. The site may use two transparent funding and service channels:

• Display advertising served by Google AdSense and similar networks. Ad placements are clearly labeled and do not influence editorial decisions or which counties we rank where.
• Third-party commercial links to independent health-insurance services. These links do not determine which counties or providers we feature, and each service operates under its own terms and privacy policy.

We do not accept paid content, sponsored statistics, or advertorials. No data source, advertiser, or commercial service has any influence over the methodology, rankings, or editorial choices on this site.

Update Cadence

Underlying data is refreshed annually, on the release schedule of each source (County Health Rankings & Roadmaps releases in spring; NPPES is continuously updated; EPA AirNow data is annual rollups). Narratives are regenerated when the underlying data for a county changes. The methodology page displays its own page-revision date and changelog. This editorial-standards page was revised on July 13, 2026.