NC-CATCH: North Carolina Comprehensive Assessment for Tracking Community Health.

other nation in the world for health, we are far from the healthiest country. In fact, the US languishes in the lower half of industrialized nations for a range of indicators used to measure health status and even trails nations considered to be economically underdeveloped for selected health indicators. Accompanying this disappointing level of overall health status are the enormous disparities in the health of groups defined by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geography. Despite decades of scrutiny by researchers and health policy analysts and numerous reports and white papers on the subject by prestigious and influential organizations such as the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies, these vast differences are pervasive and seemingly intractable. For example, poor White females in Mississippi and in Appalachia experienced declines in life expectancy between 1982 and 2001. Similarly, in North Carolina between 1975 and 2005, despite reductions in absolute rates, Black infant mortality steadily increased from 1.8 to 2.3 times the White rate.