The Big Cities Health Inventory is an open-access city-level platform providing health metrics for large U.S. cities that are members of the Big Cities Health Coalition. 

Austin, TX
Baltimore, MD
Boston, MA
Charlotte, NC
Chicago, IL
Cleveland, OH
Columbus, OH
Dallas, TX
Denver, CO
Detroit, MI
El Paso, TX
Houston, TX
Indianapolis, IN
Kansas City, MO
Las Vegas, NV
Long Beach, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Louisville, KY
Memphis, TN
Milwaukee, WI
Minneapolis, MN
New York City, NY
Oakland, CA
Oklahoma City, OK
Philadelphia, PA
Phoenix, AZ
Portland, OR
San Antonio, TX
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA
San Jose, CA
Seattle, WA
Tucson, AZ
Washington, DC

The Big Cities Health Inventory (BCHI) data platform was initially developed from the work of big city epidemiologists who published chart books on a somewhat regular basis to share information with their peers in other jurisdictions. In 2015, the BCHI data platform was launched by the Big Cities Health Coalition with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This most recent iteration of the BCHI was developed and is now maintained, by the Drexel University Urban Health Collaborative in partnership with the Big Cities Health Coalition (BCHC). 

Scroll below to learn more about the BCHC, its partners, and funding for the project.

The Big Cities Health Inventory (BCHI) is the Big Cities Health Coalition’s open-access data platform. The platform can be used to inform public health programming, conduct research and evaluation, and support grant applications, among other uses. 

Platform capabilities:

• Provides a snapshot of health in 35 of the largest cities in the U.S.
• Features downloadable and shareable charts and data points
• Contains over 150,000 data points for more than 120 health, socio-economic, built environment, and demographic metrics
• Metrics are standardized and comparable across the cities
• Most metrics have data from 2010 onward, allowing visualization of trends over time
• Many metrics include data on racial and ethnic subgroups which can be used to highlight disparities in health and social determinants of health experienced by these groups

Today, more than 80% of the U.S. population live in metropolitan areas. There is a clear need for city-level data to understand and inform a city’s health, and ensure that programs are equitable and responsive to a city’s health needs. The BCHI provides a baseline of health in urban communities, and time trends can be used to explore patterns in the data that may point to the effectiveness of policies and practices at work in Big Cities Health Coalition’s member jurisdictions.

Most of the data in the Big Cities Health Inventory come from publicly available data sources for which city data are available. Data sources were chosen based on the availability of standardized data for the majority of member cities, data available for the most recent years, and the practicability of data acquisition.

Most of the data on this platform are available for download as a CSV file. Users can download data for a chart by clicking the upper right menu on the chart. Users can also download data via our data download page. The data download codebook is here and the Technical Documentation is available here.

When using data, charts, or images from the platform, please reference the platform as follows: Big Cities Health Inventory Data Platform. Big Cities Health Coalition. Bigcitieshealthdata.org accessed [date]. 

We encourage you to share examples or stories of how you are using this data, please tag @bigcitieshealth on social media. 

If you have questions regarding the data platform, please submit them here.

The Big Cities Health Inventory data platform includes over 120 metrics related to health, which encompass 11 broad categories of public health importance:

• Life Expectancy and Deaths
• Access to Health Services
• Mental Health and Substance Use
• Chronic Health Conditions
• Infectious Diseases
• Maternal and Child Health
• Violence and Injury
• Demographics
• Climate and Built Environment
• Social and Economic Factors
• Poisoning

Platform metrics were selected if they met substantive and coverage & standardization criteria.

Metrics were selected if they met at least 1 of the following substantive criteria:

1. Public health relevance, in particular, their alignment with CDC’s Healthy People goals

2. Ability to serve as benchmarks for new policy initiatives

3. Can be used to highlight demographic and socioeconomic disparities in health and healthy environments. Note that about one-half of the metrics were in the Big Cities Health Coalition’s prior version of the platform (before the current/enhanced platform was developed).

Metrics were selected if they met all of the following coverage & standardization criteria:

1. There is a uniform source of the data, thereby ensuring comparability of the metric across jurisdictions

2. Data are available for at least 50% of the BCHC cities

3. Data are available for recent years

Additionally, we prioritized publicly available data (to facilitate ease of updating data and to enable data sharing) and city-level data (as opposed to county-level).

Please visit the project’s Technical Documentation for more information on metrics and methodology.

Where possible, the database represents census places which follow geographic boundaries for cities. For some city jurisdictions and metrics, we used county-level data due to unavailability of city-level data.  When county-level data were used, it is noted in either the subtitle of the chart or in the footnote. 

Sub-city (tract-level) data are not available on the platform.

The platform includes data for the years 2010 – 2022. However, not all years for all cities are available on the platform, and more recent data are prioritized. If data for a specific year are not currently available, it is indicated in the footnote of a chart.

The data are updated on a rolling basis.

In cases where denominators were too small, certain rates are not displayed. If data for a metric is not currently available for a particular city, it is indicated as N/A on the chart.

When available, subgroup data are shown (for example, race and ethnicity categories and sex).  However, subgroup data are often not available or denominators were too small and rates are not displayed. 

Note that important subgroups, such as Native American, Alaska Native, Pacific Islanders, and Multiple race/ethnic subgroups are only available for a very small number of metrics. 

If you have questions or suggestions regarding the data platform, please submit them here or send an email directly to uhc@drexel.edu and put "BCHC Data Platform" in the subject line.

To stay up-to-date on the Big Cities Health Inventory please make sure to follow both the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative (@DrexelUHC) and BCHC (@BigCitiesHealth) on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter.