AHRQ Community-Level Health Database

The Community-Level Health (CHL) Database, formerly the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) Database, was created by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) with funding from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund to enable research with linkable CHL-focused data derived from multiple sources and across multiple domains. Since the data is compiled from multiple sources, users are advised to consult the associated documentation to review data sources and methodological considerations (e.g., variable availability, missingness, sampling).

Variables included in the database correspond to five key CHL domains: social context (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, veteran status), economic context (e.g., income, unemployment rate), education, physical infrastructure (e.g, housing, crime, transportation), and healthcare context (e.g., health insurance). The database includes data files and codebooks by year at three levels of geography (i.e., county, ZIP Code, and census tract).