Score
Mental Health Provider Access
Higher county mental-health provider supply and lower official HRSA mental-health shortage severity score higher.
Higher values rank better for this score.
How It's Calculated
The latest published score is normalized to a 0-100 scale. The method below explains what the score rewards, with technical source metadata available for audit.
How the ranking is built
Mental Health Provider Access rewards places in counties with stronger mental-health providers supply and lower official HRSA shortage severity.
- 1
Provider rates are smoothed toward the national provider-supply rate using a prior population so tiny counties do not dominate rankings.
- 2
HRSA HPSA scores are inverted onto a 0-100 shortage score, where no active designation is treated as no official shortage signal.
- 3
Mental Health Provider Access blends its sub-signals and then percentile-ranks the blended utility across scored places. Missing provider rates receive a neutral 50 rather than a penalty.
Technical details
Read from the current master score table for this criterion.
The top 10 below ignore your blended relocation weights and sort only by Mental Health Provider Access.
What This Score Means
Mental Health Provider Access rewards places in counties with stronger mental-health providers supply and lower official HRSA shortage severity.
Statistics Feeding This Score
- County provider rateSource: County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
County mental-health providers rate from County Health Rankings.
- Provider numerator and population denominatorSource: County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
Provider counts and population denominators used for empirical-Bayes smoothing when available.
- HRSA shortage severitySource: HRSA Health Professional Shortage Areas
Official HPSA designation severity is converted so lower shortage severity scores higher.
- County matchSource: Places county spatial index
County FIPS, county name, match method, and match confidence from the place representative point.
Source Data
Known Limits
- Hospital access still uses straight-line distance from a representative place point, not road travel time, ambulance routing, congestion, or parcel-level access.
- CMS quality and ED timeliness are historical public reporting measures, not live wait times, real-time diversion status, or guarantees of care quality for a specific patient.
- Provider and specialist supply are county-level signals and do not capture exact appointment availability, insurance networks, referral patterns, or neighborhood-level provider access.
- Specialist availability uses CMS Doctors and Clinicians practice ZIPs mapped through Census ZCTA-county relationships, so ZIP-to-county assignment is approximate.
- CMS warns that NPI issuance and clinician listing data are not a live validation of licensure, credentialing, insurance acceptance, or current capacity.
Top 10 Locations
Ranked by Mental Health Provider Access.