The July 2010 edition of Preventing Chronic Disease featured a set of essays and commentaries on selecting the best tools, or metrics, for measuring and monitoring the health of communities. The essays describe the characteristics of ideal metrics and explore their use in measuring various indicators of a community’s health, including health outcomes, health inequalities, health behaviors, health care access and quality; socioeconomic indicators, environmental factors; public health policies.
Related Research
April 2026
Policy Priorities and Research Needs for Advancing Healthy Eating: A 2026-2027 Research Agenda for U.S. Children and Adolescents
Given recent changes to nutrition policies and programs and the food environment landscape, the need for new evidence on how these changes impact nutrition, health, and food access is greater than ever. HER has also published a research agenda intended to provide a blueprint for immediate (i.e., 12-18 month) research needs to inform strategies to MoreNovember 2025
Measuring the impact of charitable food program cuts on the nutritional quality of foods
This study examines how sudden cuts to USDA programs supporting the charitable food system (i.e., The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement (LFPA)) affect the supply of healthy food available for distribution by food banks. Existing data from 15 food banks will be analyzed, and additional data will MoreMarch 2025