A need for local data to inform decisions, particularly in rural communities.

Accurate, up-to-date data is critical when choosing public health strategies that meet a community’s needs. COVID-19 vaccination rates may be influenced by a variety of factors, and it is often challenging to access all relevant data in a single tool.

Interactive mapping tool that will help guide rural communities’ strategies around COVID-19.

With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), NORC developed the Rural Health Mapping Tool. The publicly available tool provides information on COVID-19 vaccination rates, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, and other health and sociodemographic information in communities across the United States. The Rural Health Mapping Tool has several features that are particularly useful for rural communities.

• Users can create a map view that displays only the rural counties in the United States, which will highlight areas of need and resources.

• Every county also has an individual fact sheet, which compares all county-level data to the rest of their state and to the nation.

• All data included in the tool can be downloaded for free and used by local leaders, decision-makers, researchers, and the public.

The Rural Health Mapping Tool offers benefits beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

The tool integrates several measures of health and prosperity into a single tool, providing a comprehensive picture of the well-being of rural communities. The tool is the first to display a publicly available county-level map of the NORC-developed prosperity index, which provides a single numerical measure designed to reflect the prosperity of a county, based on 16 indicators. With this new tool, users can observe the associations between the prosperity of a county and a range of health and other factors, including the leading causes of death, sociodemographic factors, and physical environment and access to healthcare indicators.