The Community Human Development Index (CHDI): A Novel Metric for Precision Public Health

Precision Public Health is fundamentally focused on determining the right intervention for the right population at the right time in order to improve health outcomes. It requires a multifaceted understanding of how both physical and social environmental conditions lead to better outcomes for residential populations over the long term. Here we present the Community Human Development Index (CHDI), a novel precision public health framework and metric to measure the capabilities of populations across spatial scales and over time. We show how CHDI can be constructed and measured across geographic scales in the United States, and show the substantial variation in development that emerges at the neighborhood scale. We then detail the changes in development indicators in the US at the county level over the last 30 years, showing how there have been average improvements across the US, but also rapidly increasing variation. We finally examine the relationship between health risk, vulnerability, and development at the census tract level in the US, and show that the CHDI can be an effective tool in measuring and mitigating health risk and vulnerability in communities.