Health care access, cost, quality, and outcomes can vary greatly from one community to the next—both within states and across states—depending on the performance of the health care system available to residents, according to the first-ever local health system scorecard from The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System. The report measures how 306 local U.S. areas are doing on key health care indicators such as insurance coverage, preventive care, mortality rates, potentially avoidable hospital use, and costs. It finds significant differences between leading and lagging localities, and wide disparities among major cities on many key measures of health care system performance. An interactive map enables comparison of cities and communities across the U.S. Join the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #localhealth.
