Data Resources for Health & Medical Research

FOOD Tool was developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to make Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System data more available to the public and stakeholders.

The Personal Genome Project was founded in 2005 and is dedicated to creating public genome, health, and trait data. Sharing data is critical to scientific progress, but has been hampered by traditional research practices. PGP's approach is to invite willing participants to publicly share their personal data for the greater good.

The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP, pronounced "H-Cup") is a family of health care databases and related software tools and products developed through a Federal-State-Industry partnership and sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). These databases enable research on a broad range of health policy issues, including cost and quality of health services, medical practice patterns, access to health care programs, and outcomes of treatments at the national, State, and local market levels.

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) has monitored the health of the nation since 1957. NHIS data on a broad range of health topics are collected through personal household interviews. For over 50 years, the U.S. Census Bureau has been the data collection agent for the National Health Interview Survey. Survey results have been instrumental in providing data to track health status, health care access, and progress toward achieving national health objectives.

The CDC National Notifiable Diseases surveillance System (NNDSS) is the nation’s public health surveillance system that enables all levels of public health (local, state, territorial, federal and international) to share information on diseases and conditions that the Council of State and Territorial
Epidemiologists (CSTE), in consultation with CDC, has designated as nationally notifiable. Public health professionals use the data from NNDSS to
monitor, control, and prevent the occurrence and spread of disease.

This resources offers mapping options for country-level data.

Released to the public on April 14, 1997, this atlas is the first to show all leading causes of death by race and sex for small U.S. geographic areas referred to as Health Service Areas (HSAs). The 18 causes of death included in this atlas account for 83 percent of all deaths in the United States during 1988-92.

Use listed categories to investigate topics further.

Geography is the study of how the world differs from place to place. Geography uses a spatial, or geospatial perspective, meaning it focuses on place and space, looking at what, where and why phenomena occur. Geographers use a variety of tools to study these topics such as maps, statistics, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GIS is a computer system consisting of hardware and software used to store, manipulate, analyze, model, and display spatial and non-spatial data.

This resource indicates trends in the health of Americans and includes over 140 trend tables with topics ranging from disability to education to infectious disease.

The Chronic Disease GIS exchange is an on-line forum for public health professionals and community leaders to learn and share techniques for using GIS to enhance chronic disease prevention and treatment.

This website provides access to outdoor air quality data collected from state, local and tribal monitoring agencies across the United States.

The CDC FluView report provides weekly influenza surveillance information in the United States. These applications were developed to enhance the weekly FluView report by better facilitating communication about influenza with the public health community, clinicians, scientists, and the general public. This series of dynamic visualizations allow any Internet user to access influenza information collected by CDC’s monitoring systems.

Open Humans is a program of the nonprofit Open Humans Foundation and has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Knight Foundation. Their 2015 launch was written up in Forbes, Newsweek, Scientific American, and more. The Open Humans Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to enabling individuals to access their data and share it with research studies. Other projects of the organization include the Global Network of Personal Genome Projects and the Genome Environments Trait (GET) Conference.

openSNP lets customers of direct-to-customer genetic tests publish their test results, find others with similar genetic variations, learn more about their results by getting the latest primary literature on their variations, and helps scientists find new associations.

In a single electronic platform, the WHO’s Communicable Disease Global Atlas is bringing together for analysis and comparison standardized data and statistics for infectious diseases at country, regional, and global levels. The analysis and interpretation of data are further supported through information on demography, socioeconomic conditions, and environmental factors. In so doing, the Atlas specifically acknowledges the broad range of determinants that influence patterns of infectious disease transmission.

The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) monitors six types of health-risk behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of death and disability among youth and adults as well as the prevalence of obesity and asthma and other health-related behaviors. See the "Data and Documentation" option for more information about national, state, and urban area data from selected surveys from 1991-2015.

The Cancer Mortality Maps website provides dynamically generated maps for the time period 1950-2004 (1970-2004 only for African Americans).

The GDC Data Portal is a robust data-driven platform that allows cancer researchers and bioinformaticians to search and download cancer data for analysis.

This website provides resources for interactive mapping, exploring, and downloading, geographically based cancer related information. Cancer researchers, cancer control planners, cancer advocacy groups, and public health officials are encouraged to use these resources in their efforts to help reduce the cancer burden in the United States.

The State Cancer Profiles are dynamic views of cancer statistics for prioritizing cancer control efforts in the nation, states, and counties.

The State Cancer Profiles offer dynamic tables based on your data options input.

The State Cancer Profiles are dynamic views of cancer statistics. Here, you can select different data options to generate maps.

The National Cancer Institute, Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) collects information on incidence, survival, and prevalence from specific geographic areas representing 26 percent of the US population and compiles reports on all of these plus cancer mortality for the entire US.

HIV Surveillance reports disseminate data about HIV and AIDS, with data such as the number and population rates of HIV diagnoses, the number of people living with HIV, and the number of people who are receiving HIV medical care.

NHBS data are used to provide a behavioral context for trends seen in HIV surveillance data. They also describe populations at increased risk for HIV infection and thus provide an indication of the leading edge of the epidemic. Through systematic surveillance in groups at high risk for HIV infection, NHBS is critical for monitoring the impact of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, which focuses on decreasing HIV incidence, improving linkage to care, and reducing disparities.