Research and Education Librarian
Due to current Executive Orders requiring the review of federal websites, including those maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services, some federal data sources and documents may be temporarily unavailable. If you’re unable to access content that was previously available on a federal website, we recommend checking Policy Commons (available via our A–Z Databases page) or the Internet Archive , which may have an archived copy of the original material.
How to Use This Guide
This guide provides links to sources of data and statistics collected and provided by numerous organizations and agencies. You can find potential sources of data and statistics by topic area. Health data and statistics can be difficult to find. Some of the things that make this so challenging are:
- Health data collection is decentralized, and carried out by many different government, non-governmental and private agencies, and organizations. This will include organizations working at the national, state, and local levels. Data quality, collection methodology and accessibility will vary considerably.
- Data collection and dissemination takes time and resources. There is often a lag time between collection and availability, and thus real-time data can be difficult to come by
- If you're looking for help finding and using health statistics, look at the resources below.
- For curated collections of sources for health-related statistics and data sets at the state, national, and global level, click on the links at left.
Getting Started with Health Statistics
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Finding and Using Health StatisticsThis online tutorial developed by the National Library of Medicine can be a good place to start when learning about finding and using health statistics. The course describes different types of health statistics, how they are collected, and where they can be found.
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Health Statistics on the Web (Video)Learn the difference between data and statistics, key features and use of health statistics, steps to finding health statistics, and sources of health statistics at the local, state, and national level. (Live NNLM class, recorded on March 2, 2022)