Health Rankings

For the past 20 years, the United Health Foundation has published "America's Health Rankings," an annual analysis of the nation's health on a state-by-state basis. The 2009 rankings reveal that the overall health of the U.S. population has slightly improved over the past year and that Florida ranks as the 36th healthiest state, the same ranking it held in 2008. These data for Florida from 2006 to 2009, summarized in Table 1, are comprised of two major categories:

1. Determinants, and
2. Health Outcomes.

Determinants are the demographic characteristics that are observed in the residents of Florida. These determinants affect the health outcomes that will be seen in the future. For example, the steady increase in the prevalence of obesity can be expected to contribute to an increase in the number of cardiovascular and cancer deaths in the coming years.

A characteristic of the Table 1 data important to examine is the magnitude of the change over the four-year time period. A common technique to not only determine the magnitude but to compare changes among different determinants is to use a "standard score." The standard score in Table 1 indicates how many standard deviations the 2009 data are above or below the four year average. (Standard deviation is a measure of the variability in a set of data.) Obesity has a standard score of +1.3, while binge drinking has standard score of +0.4; thus, the change in obesity has roughly three times the magnitude as the change in binge drinking. Using the standard score allows one to make informed decisions between the severities of determinants and health outcomes. Health outcomes are a key driving force behind biomedical research priorities.