Who builds HealthAtlas
HealthAtlas is built and operated by Astronexus LLC, an independent health-data practice. It exists because the questions it answers — where care is thin, how much of that is explained by need, and how the US compares internationally — are answerable from public data that almost nobody has taken the trouble to join up.
What this is
An atlas of geographic variation in US health care: specialist access, CDC PLACES disease burden, Medicare utilisation and spending, hospital quality, shortage areas and social vulnerability — all keyed to county, with an OECD international layer alongside.
The hard part is not the map. It is the join: more than a dozen federal and open sources normalised to a single county frame with consistent vintages, suppression handling and recorded provenance, refreshed automatically as the upstream files change. On top of that sit multivariable regression, county clustering, and case-mix adjustment.
Everything here is public-domain or openly licensed data. No EHR, no restricted claims, no data-use agreement. The methods page sets out what each statistic means and — just as important — what it does not.
Free to use
Every layer on the map exports to CSV, and any view exports to a slide-ready PNG with the title and legend composited in. Both are free, ungated and require no sign-up, and they will stay that way.
The API is open too. If you are a researcher, student or journalist, take what you need — the methods page lists what to cite for each source.
Work with us
Available for consulting
This site is the portfolio, not the product. The same work is available directly:
- Public health-data engineering — ingesting, joining and maintaining CMS, CDC, HRSA, Census and comparable sources into something queryable and current.
- Geographic and variation analysis — county- or region-level analysis of access, utilisation, spending and outcomes, with the caveats stated plainly.
- Custom cuts and bespoke tools — a specific analysis for a deadline, or an interactive tool like this one built against your question.
Astronexus LLC · health201.com. Email is the fastest route; say what question you are trying to answer and what data you already hold.
How to read what you see here
Everything on this site is a county-level or coarser public aggregate. Model outputs, cluster labels and the synthesised county signals are statistical associations across places — not causal findings, not clinical judgements, and not statements about any individual. Inferring something about a person from a county average is the ecological fallacy, and it is the mistake this kind of map invites.
Two specific limits worth carrying with you. Medicare rates here are price-standardised but not age/sex/race standardised — the demographic standardisation the Dartmouth Atlas was known for cannot be reproduced from the public CMS files, so the site offers covariate case-mix adjustment instead and labels it as such. And the HRR/HSA views are a derived county rollup, not native Dartmouth region rates; some sub-metro regions carry no value at all.
Full detail, per statistic and per source, is on the methods page. HRR/HSA geography is used with the required attribution to The Dartmouth Atlas (RWJF & Dartmouth CTSI, NIH/NCATS UL1TR001086); this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.