Expanding Researcher Access to Public Health Surveillance Data

Why This Platform Exists

Reliable public health research depends on accessible, well-documented data. This platform exists to reduce the technical overhead of working with the BRFSS public-use files so that researchers can focus on analysis.

The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) is the world's largest continuously conducted health survey, collecting data on preventive health practices and risk behaviors linked to chronic diseases across all US states and territories. It is a primary resource for understanding how chronic disease, health behaviors, and access to care vary across populations.

A single year of BRFSS data exceeds 1 GB in size and is distributed in the SAS XPT format, which is not directly readable by most general-purpose statistical tools without a SAS or SPSS license. For students, early-career researchers, and public health professionals at institutions without that infrastructure, this format requirement adds a practical hurdle between the data and the analysis.

This platform addresses that hurdle by letting users select only the variables their research requires and download an analysis-ready CSV file at no cost — ready to use in R, Python, Excel, Stata, or any other standard tool. No software license is required, and no registration is necessary.

The goal is straightforward: make a widely used federal surveillance dataset easier to subset, easier to load, and easier to incorporate into rigorous academic and public health research.