Health Rankings

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America's Health Ranking Report by the United Health Foundation is an annual report that focus's on behaviors, the environment and community, public and health policies, clinical care, and outcomes to provide a score that gives us a picture of the nation's overall health. Several measures are used to determine the overall health rankings. In 2013, Tennessee was ranked 42nd, down from 39th in 2012. Dr. Randy Wykoff explains that this is due to a change of the metrics used to calculate this years rankings. What he suggests is that if the same metrics were used in 2012 as in 2013, Tennessee would have been 42nd in 2012 as well. Therefore, Tennessee only looks worse on paper, rather than actually being worse in overall health.
The overall health scores are based on determinants as well as outcomes. Behavioral determinants include: smoking, binge drinking, drug deaths, obesity, physical inactivity, and high school graduation rate. Community and environmental determinants include: violent crime, occupational fatalities, infectious diseases, children in poverty, and air pollution. Public and health policy determinants include: lack of health insurance, public health funding, and number of adolescent and children immunizations. Clinical care determinants include: accessibility to early prenatal care, availability of primary care physicians and dentists, and preventable hospitalizations. Finally, several different outcomes are used to determine the overall score. Those include: development of diabetes, poor mental and physical health days, disparity in health status, infant mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer deaths, and premature deaths.
These measures are weighted based on three criteria. Those criteria are: 1) W...

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...ears, the obesity data in 2012 and 2013 can't be compared to the previous years data because of the difference in metrics used to calculate the data.
And thirdly, based on the fact that cardiac heart disease has consistently been the number one cause of death in the United States, I believe that this is the third major health problem that Tennessee, as well as most other states, will have to face in the next decade. There was a sharp increase in the percentage of people diagnosed with heart disease in Tennessee from 2012 to 2013, from 5% to 7.2%, and although the heart disease data from before 2012 can't be compared to current data, there was still a sharp increase from 2012 to 2013. In summary, I believe that an increased number of children living in poverty, obesity, and heart disease are the three major health problems facing Tennessee in the next decade.

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