Hannah Olson-Williams
November 20, 2025
For over fifteen years, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) has provided data, evidence, and tools to help communities better understand health and how they can take action to improve health and equity. With our current funding ending, we are exploring ways to innovate under a different funding model to sustain and evolve CHR&R resources.
This project aims to expand access to county-level public health data by moving CHR&R calculations, documentation, and data onto open-source platforms and tools. In doing so, we hope to build a community of data scientists and public health professionals who can help make aspects of CHR&R self-sustaining, while also supporting ongoing efforts to secure new funding.
One of CHR&R’s strengths has always been its documentation and usability, making complex public health data approachable for a wide range of users. As we move to a publicly accessible infrastructure, our goal is to preserve these strengths while embracing new opportunities to expand access, enhance reproducibility, and build a community of users.
As part of this fellowship, I intend to explore:
An R package to make CHR&R data readily accessible in R with clear documentation and metadata. By lowering barriers to use, we aim to broaden the audience, support reproducible research, and encourage innovative applications of our data.
A Shiny app to replicate core aspects of the CHR&R website. Many of our users are small local health departments with limited data capacity, so usability is a priority. The app will provide interactive access to county-level health data.
GitHub and Zenodo archives including data, documentation, and select calculations. In an era where data sources can be volatile, these documented archives are especially important. We aim to ensure that a record of CHR&R’s history remains accessible and reproducible while building a foundation for community engagement and long-term sustainability.
Preserving CHR&R data and making it accessible in new ways helps researchers, public health and healthcare professionals, and local communities understand and address the root causes of health disparities. By lowering barriers to use and building a collaborative community, CHR&R resources can continue to inform policy and practice long after our funding ends.
Thank you for providing mentorship, training, and resources to make this project possible!
Whether you’ve used County Health Rankings & Roadmaps data in the past or are just hearing about us now, we’d love to collaborate with you! Please find us on GitHub at github.com/countyhealthrankings.