Health concerns are well-documented across the United States, but their root causes are not as clear. In order to adequately address these concerns, we must understand what sorts of barriers and conditions are driving them, especially across the urban/rural divide–a data portal with
 quantifiable measures across a wide variety of domains can help us accomplish this. The Healthy Communities Data Portal (HCDP) is a national database of quantifiable measures and variables of health concerns at different geographic scales that may be linked to health and clinical data. It will allow for researchers, community members, policy makers and more to promote positive health outcomes for all individuals across the United States.

The HCDP can be used in a variety of ways. Researchers may use the portal to acquire community-level data on housing and transportation for use in a study examining the relationship between housing affordability, car access, and health outcomes. Staff at a nonprofit organization may use portal data to identify potential interventions in housing, education, or employment that may include mortality outcomes. Below is a list of datasets hosted in this portal, along with a brief description for each, to help get you started incorporating the portal into your work. Data sets can be filtered by theme and geographic level in the Data page of this hub.