Recently the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released its second annual County Health Rankings, a within-state comparison of county health covering each county in every state the United States.
Newspapers and TV news programs jumped all over the results — particularly local outlets serving counties that were ranked comparatively lower than their neighbors. “If you are looking for a healthy county, head north,” read a March 30 article in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin of San Bernandino, Calif.
Some critics took the County Health Rankings to task for not telling us anything new. Which is a fair point — the researchers didn’t collect any new data. Nor did they re-analyze data to test hypotheses, a common way that health-services researchers explore questions about health and health care. Instead, they simply aggregated previously collected information and compiled it into lists: some showed actual measures of health , while others covered known determinants of health .
These results were not surprising: poorer urban and rural counties landed at the bottom of each state’s health rankings and the richer suburban counties reigned.
So why does this study matter? The answer can be found in the big headlines peppering local newspapers throughout the country: people are paying attention. It doesn’t matter that the findings fit with conventional wisdom. The goal of the RWJF study is clear — to make health and the things that contribute to poor health a priority for communities and their leaders. How it achieves that goal is all in the framing.
