The CDC’s 500 Cities Project recently published 28 health measures on the 500 largest U.S. cities (see them listed or mapped). The measures cover various resident behaviors, afflictions, medication, and screening. We at OnlyBoth downloaded the data and set up a cities benchmarking engine to answer these standard comparative questions: How is this city doing?, Where could it improve?, and What’s best in class?

Just enter any of the 500 cities at 500cities.onlyboth.com. Then click on a left-side question to discover noteworthy peer groups in which your selection is near the top or bottom. Or, set up a fencemarking query and click Go at the bottom to, for example, learn the top insights among all 121 California cities, or to uncover comparatively-high binge drinking there (guess who?).

To appreciate this technology and its simplifying potential to motivate human and customer progress, compare to how standard dashboards have been applied to the 500 Cities data. Or, to understand why dashboards aren’t really up to the task of comparative performance evaluation, check out Why San Mateo Daily Journal Really Doesn’t Like California’s Education Dashboards.

Lastly, if you also wish to benchmark counties, read here.

A sentence is worth 1,000 data.®

Raul Valdes-Perez