About
An independent, unofficial scorecard of Louisiana's 64 parishes across health indicators grouped into four domains — Health Access, Health Outcomes, Health Utilization, and Social Determinants — built from data used on the LDH Rural Health Transformation & Sustainability platform. It is not an official Louisiana Department of Health product.
Data sources
U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year estimates; U.S. Census Bureau Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE); CDC PLACES 2025, 2024, and 2021 releases; USDA Food Access Research Atlas 2019; FCC broadband availability data; CMS Hospital Cost Report and Provider of Services data; HRSA Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) designations.
The dashed national average marker on the scorecard, and the "nationally" figure in the summary sentence, come from the most recent published national aggregates for each measure (CDC BRFSS/NHIS, U.S. Census Bureau, and the FCC) — see assets/national-averages.json for the exact source and survey year behind each figure. A few use the closest available survey vintage rather than an exact match to the parish/state figures; those are flagged in that file. Not every metric has a comparable published national figure — hospital counts, rural-hospital ED visits, and primary care shortage severity are parish/state facts without a standard national rate, so no national marker is shown for them.
Methodology
Tile map: parishes are drawn as equal squares on a grid that preserves rough geographic position, not true shape or size. Color shows the selected metric's raw value on a single light-to-dark scale; the caption states whether darker is favorable or unfavorable for that metric.
Scorecard: each row's gray band runs from the lowest to the highest parish value, flipped so the favorable end is on the right. The black tick marks the comparison average; the dot marks the selected parish, colored blue when it sits on the favorable side of the tick and orange otherwise.
Averages: state, region, and rurality-class averages are simple averages across parishes, not weighted by population.
Coronary heart disease, general health, and frequent physical distress: CDC PLACES publishes these only at the census-tract level. Parish figures here are a population-weighted average of each parish's tracts (weighted by adult population), consistent with how CDC recommends aggregating PLACES tract estimates to larger geographies. This is 2024-release tract data, a different vintage than the 2025-release figures for the other CDC PLACES metrics on this page.