The text presented here provides a general overview of health care costs in Centre County. This information may be copied/shared freely.

Data on health status is usually organized into three categories.

Mortality data includes information on death rates for various diseases other non-disease causes. These data are often analyzed by sex, race, age at death, and other characteristics of the deceased within a given time period. Death rates for a particular jurisdiction (e.g., county) may be compared with similar local, state and national data.

Morbidity data focus on the leading causes of illness, injury and disability. Morbidity rates are based on the incidence or prevalence of disease and other non-disease health events within a defined population and area. Incidence is a measure of new cases of a disease or other health event that occur during a period of time. Prevalence is a measure of all diseases or cases and occurrences of an event that exist a particular period of time.

Health risk data are concerned with variables which research has shown to be related to poor health status, such as poverty rates and percent receiving no prenatal care in the 1st trimester, as well as self-reported behavioral data, such as perceived health status, difficulties encountered in accessing health care, seat belt usage, and similar health risk variables

Typically, simple counts of health events-e.g., number of deaths attributable to heart disease or number of individuals with HIV/AIDS in a given population--are inadequate for purposes of making comparisons to similar events in other populations. For example, knowing that Centre County had 833 deaths due to heart disease in the time period 2000-2002 while the state had 118,145 such deaths, has little meaning for purposes of comparison. Using rates of occurrence, such as percent of pregnant women receiving no prenatal care during the 1st trimester or numbers of infant deaths per 1,000 live births, allows for useful comparisons. Thus, mortality, morbidity and health-risk data are usually presented as rates. Moreover, these rates are frequently adjusted for age, sex, and race differences among the populations being studied and compared. In using health status data, it is important to note the rate being reported and any adjustments made in the information presented.

In Pennsylvania, the richest source of health status information is the Department of Health's Bureau of Health Statistics, which makes available a variety of health status data at county, regional, and statewide levels. The Bureau's home page can be accessed at the following web site: www.dsf.health.pa.us/health/. From this home page, a user can access a variety of health data sources by clicking on the link Health Statistics and Vital Records. The table of links below lists and describes many of the health status data sets available from the Bureau of Health Statistics.

There are also other sources of health status information on Pennsylvania residents. Many times, the data are embedded in a larger data set or report. A good example of the former is the Center for Rural Pennsylvania's County Profiles, which can be accessed at the following web site: http://www.ruralpa.org/county_profiles.html. The Center's Profiles are an excellent resource for summary information related to demography, health status and health resources for each Pennsylvania county as well as the state. Another example is the Pennsylvania Department of Health's report, Oral Health in Pennsylvania, issued in 2002. This report presents both data on oral health in Pennsylvania and prescriptive narratives on oral health prevention and treatment.

The accompanying table provides direct links to web sites containing health status data for Centre County and Pennsylvania, and in a few cases regional data for the Department of Health's Districts.