In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Obama announced a “moon shot” project to find a cure for cancer. A recent Marketplace story explained that a big focus of this project is to make more data available to researchers. You’re probably not a cancer researcher, but many public and social sector organizations focus on health and could use more data for market research. Here are several sources for free health data sets to help you in your projects:
- US Census Bureau health data http://www.census.gov/topics/health.html
The Census Bureau offers a wealth of data and has a dedicated health section
- Healthdata.gov https://www.healthdata.gov/
125 years of US healthcare data including claim-level Medicare data, epidemiology and population statistics.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/ftp_data.htm
Contains surveys as well as statistics
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality http://hcupnet.ahrq.gov/
The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project from the Department of Health and Human Services focuses on hospital inpatient and emergency department utilization.
- The World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/topic/health
Health is a major component of the Millennium Goals. Use this page to access health data from the World Bank.
- European Union Open Data Portal http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/
This web site is somewhat like the Census Bureau for the EU, if the EU had such a thing. It contains nearly 500 health-related data sets.
- NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre http://www.hscic.gov.uk/home
Health data sets from the UK National Health Service.
- Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation http://kff.org/statedata/
This foundation’s web site offers an easy interface for locating state-level health data.
- Gapminder http://www.gapminder.org/data/
Gapminder contains more than 500 free data sets from sources such as the World Health Organization and World Bank, and a great number of them relate to health or public health.
A hat tip to Bernard Marr for his list of free data sources.
“Snow-cholera-map“. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.
