A new methodology for reporting the status of community health improvement in the United States

To assure that Healthy Communities are achieved, a tracking methodology is proposed using four health improvement categories. Counties are classified as having met or not met nine HP2010 mortality targets and as improving or not improving, creating four categories of community health improvement - static, progressing, exemplary, and maintaining. Exemplary counties make up 1.7%32.7% of counties, counties have both improved and met the HP2010 target during the period. Across all indicators, a large proportion remains of counties that have neither met the HP2010 target nor improved (33.572.8%). Understanding why, how, and in what ways communities move from static to maintaining categories is necessary to guiding every local public health system to community health improvement.