About Health, United States
Health, United States provides a wide array of trends in health statistics to policymakers, public health professionals, and the public. It presents statistics in four overarching areas: health status and determinants, health care utilization, health care resources, and health expenditures and payers.
In addition to presenting key findings from the major data collection systems of the National Center for Health Statistics and other CDC programs, Health, United States uses data from other federal agencies, as well as private and global sources.
New Changes with Health, United States, 2020–2021
Health, United States, 2020–2021 is the 44th edition of the congressionally mandated annual reporting on health statistics. Over the years, the Health, United States program has updated how it reports data based on the ways that readers search for, access, and use health statistics. To better meet the needs of today’s readers, Health, United States materials will be published online periodically throughout the year. This change will better align releases with data availability from more than 40 data sources.
The cornerstone of the redesigned Health, United States are the trend tables. These trend tables provide data supporting analyses in topic pages, including key findings, featured charts, and trend analyses on a given health topic. The topic pages also contain links to detailed methodology available on a new Sources and Definitions page. Trend tables are indexed through the searchable Data Finder.
Starting with the 2020–2021 edition, a brief annual report—the Health, United States: Annual Perspective—will integrate selected analyses from the Health, United States topics released online. This report is submitted on behalf of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to the President and Congress in compliance with Section 308 of the Public Health Service Act.
Each Annual Perspective explores a theme across multiple indicators and data sources, and the theme for the 44th edition is health disparities. Health, United States reports prior to the redesigned 2020–2021 edition are available from the Previous Reports page.
Health, United States: Annual Perspective
Discover patterns in national health trends.