Summit County was one of the highest cost of health insurance in the country. Making informed decisions requires context and valid data. Without effective data transparency, stakeholders cannot be held accountable. Articles in Denver Post provide links to data resources such as CIVHC and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). This Health Data Portal hopes to provide data transparency resources for a variety of stakeholders, including journalists. See these articles:
The reason for this section is to show how data is used in articles to inform the public, but in the absence of credible data references like those below, policy makers are either frustrated by conflicting and invalid data, or their policies will be ineffective or counter-productive.
The articles above show a need for data below, in pdf format, that have been extracted from data downloaded from CIVHC. Data by region is less useful than county data because regions have no authoritative management. Local Health Agencies should avail themselves of the Excel tables here, to see the extracts of their own respective counties. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) should encourage the development of data portals like this one, including the data sets at CoHID (Colorado Health Information Data).
For comparison of Summit to other Counties with metrics of the All Payer Claims Database, go to the CIVHC folder.
US News and World Report reports on all 3,000 counties in the USA (without data sets). See Summit County , #26 overall ranking.
Colorado Health Foundation in partnership with Colorado Health Institute has developed the Colorado Health Report Card, Snapshots of their metrics are available in pdf format (no hyperlinks or data sets). See Summit County.