Constructing Within-City Neighborhood Health Rankings in Philadelphia by Using Data From the 500 Cities Project

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Flowchart consisting of 10 steps starts with “Identify local data within the CHR domains” (a data compilation process), then leads to “Collect supplementary city or other administrative data” (a data compilation process), and then “Calculate neighborhood measures, as needed” (a data compilation process). Feeding into the “Calculate neighborhood measures, as needed” is “Designate neighborhood boundaries within the city” (a neighborhood designation process) and “Download 500 Cities data” (a data compilation process). The next 4 steps are part of the calculations and ranking process: “Match neighborhood measures to CHR domains,” “Determine weights for each measure using CHR weights as starting point,” “Standardize all measures by creating z scores, and “Sum all variables and rank each neighborhood.” The last step is “Create quartiles.

Figure 1.
Process for creating neighborhood health rankings in Philadelphia using 500 Cities health data combined with local and administrative data. Abbreviation: CHR, County Health Rankings.

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Two maps of the city of Philadelphia illustrate that neighborhoods with poor health rankings are concentrated in the city’s northern, lower northeastern, western, and southwestern regions.

Figure 2.
Quartiles of neighborhood health rankings in Philadelphia for health outcomes and health factors. The higher the rank, the worse the health. Diagonal hatching indicates special land-use tracts that were excluded from rankings.

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A bar chart of the cross-tabulation of health factor rank quartiles against health outcome rank quartiles shows that these rankings generally were associated. Neighborhoods with better health outcome ranks were predominantly in the better health factor rank and, similarly, neighborhoods with worse health outcome ranks were predominantly in the worse health factor rank.

Figure 3.
Distribution of health factor rank quartiles within health outcome rank quartiles. Numbers in chart are counts of neighborhoods in the corresponding category of both health factor and health outcome rank quartile. Q, quartile.

Distribution of health factor rank quartiles within health outcome rank quartiles. Numbers in chart are counts of neighborhoods in the corresponding category of both health factor and health outcome rank quartile. Q, quartile.

Rank		Health Factor Rank
		No. (%) of neighborhoods in Q1 (Best)	No. (%) of neighborhoods in Q2	No. (%) of neighborhoods in Q3	No. (%) of neighborhoods in Q4 (Worst)	No. of neighborhoods in all quartiles (n = 46)
Health Factors Rank	No. (%) of neighborhoods in Q1 (Best)	9 (81.8)	1 (8.3)	1 (8.3)	0	11 (100.0)
	No. (%) of neighborhoods in Q2	2 (18.2)	8 (66.7)	2 (16.7)	0	12 (100.0)
	No. (%) of neighborhoods in Q3	0	3 (25.0)	6 (50.0)	3 (27.3)	12 (100.0)
	No. (%) of neighborhoods in Q4 (Worst)	0	0	3 (25.0)	8 (72.7)	11 (100.0)

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