Compound Health Signals
When multiple risks converge in the same place.
Most community health reporting looks at one dimension at a time. We surface the counties where environmental risk, disease burden, provider shortage, and social vulnerability fire together — the patterns that are invisible in any single-source dashboard.
What is a compound health signal?
A compound health signal fires when a U.S. county scores above a threshold on more than one of our four risk pillars at the same time:
- Environmental Risk — PM2.5, ozone, hazardous waste, drinking water, traffic, heat
- Disease Burden — chronic disease prevalence, mortality, cancer incidence
- Provider Gap — primary care and specialist supply vs. population need
- SDOH Stress — food insecurity, housing, transportation, economic vulnerability
Single-dimension reporting tells you that something is wrong. Compound signals tell you where multiple things are going wrong together — which is where strategic response is most leveraged.
How detection works
Each pillar is scored on a 0–100 scale anchored to the U.S. national mean (50). Counties scoring at or above the 70th percentile on a pillar are considered elevated on that dimension. A compound signal is any county elevated on two or more pillars simultaneously.
The filter is tunable: percentile threshold (any value 50–95), minimum dimension count (2 of 4 through 4 of 4), and named patterns (see below). The output is a list of every U.S. county that matches, ranked by composite Opportunity Score.
Full pillar weights, signal threshold derivation, and validation are in the Methodology.
Metro vs. rural: same framework, different signal shape
Compound signals don't only show up in rural counties or only in big metros. The same four-pillar framework surfaces radically different patterns at different scales:
Harris County, TX
Houston · pop. 4.7M
Industrial-corridor environmental load (refineries, ship channel) plus chronic disease prevalence well above the national mean. The county-level score masks tract-level severity in petrochemical-corridor neighborhoods, which shows up clearly in the tract drill-down.
San Augustine County, TX
East Texas · pop. ~7,800
A different signal shape entirely — disease burden and SDOH stress both elevated, with a thin provider network and limited service-line capacity. The compound-signal framework surfaces the rural intensity that gets lost in raw-count reporting dominated by metro denominators.
Four named patterns
Beyond the generic “N of 4 dimensions elevated” filter, we publish four named compound patterns that bundle specific indicator combinations into a single named signal:
Respiratory Burden
Elevated PM2.5/ozone plus elevated COPD/asthma prevalence plus a thin pulmonology workforce. Surfaces counties where respiratory care is structurally underprovisioned for the local environmental load.
Wildfire Smoke Vulnerability
Recent wildfire smoke exposure plus elevated respiratory and cardiovascular disease burden plus social vulnerability. Used heavily by behavioral and respiratory health planners.
Heat Health Risk
High summer heat exposure plus elderly population fraction plus social vulnerability plus housing-quality stress. Surfaces counties where extreme-heat events translate to mortality.
Industrial Pollution Burden
EPA TRI / RMP / Superfund proximity plus chronic disease prevalence plus SDOH stress. The compound signal that surfaces what the petrochemical and industrial-legacy corridors look like at the county scale.
Why this matters for CHNAs and planning
Most CHNAs report each indicator separately and let the reader piece them together. That mostly never happens. The compound signal makes the convergence visible directly — and in a format that a community-health committee, a board of directors, or a grant reviewer can act on without wading through a 200-page PDF.
Strategic response — service line investment, mobile clinic placement, mitigation grants, advocacy targeting — has to be prioritized somehow. Compound signals give you a defensible, data-driven prioritization framework instead of intuition or the loudest stakeholder.
See compound signals for your area.
The four-pillar single-county profile is free with email signup. Compound signal filters across multiple counties are part of the Pro tier.