Rep. Ritchie Torres Introduces the Community Health Profiles Act to Expand Neighborhood-Level Public Health Data Nationwide

Yesterday, Congressman Ritchie Torres (NY-15) introduced the Community Health Profiles Act, legislation to establish a federal pilot program supporting the development of neighborhood-level, publicly accessible health data platforms and to create a National Neighborhood Health Data Repository at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The bill directs the Department of Health and Human Services, acting through the CDC, to award competitive grants to up to 25 state and local health departments or municipal governments to build or enhance online health data platforms that provide detailed, neighborhood-level insights. These platforms would integrate federal, state, and local data systems and focus on identifying and addressing health disparities.

Under the legislation, grant recipients would provide de-identified, aggregated data to a newly established National Neighborhood Health Data Repository. The Repository would be publicly accessible, searchable, and designed to allow comparisons across jurisdictions while maintaining strict privacy protections.

The bill prioritizes communities experiencing health disparities, including medically underserved, low-income, and environmentally burdened areas. It supports the development of tools that include visualizations, maps, trend lines, and downloadable datasets, giving residents, researchers, and policymakers clearer insight into conditions affecting public health at the neighborhood level.

The data domains covered under the program would include social and economic conditions, housing quality, maternal and child health, health care access, chronic disease prevalence, HIV and Hepatitis C trends, infant mortality, premature death, and life expectancy. By disaggregating data to the ZIP code, neighborhood or census tract level, the legislation aims to provide actionable information that can guide targeted interventions and improve health equity.

The bill also establishes an independent advisory panel of experts in epidemiology, statistics, public health surveillance, and data privacy to review and certify the methodology used to aggregate national data. The pilot program would operate for four years and include a formal evaluation and report to Congress on outcomes and recommendations for national expansion.

The full text of the bill is attached as a PDF here.