Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP)

Description:

The FORHP data contains the same data that are used for the Rural Health Grants Eligibility Analyzer. These files do not replace the use of the Rural Health Grants Eligibility Analyzer for determination of eligibility for Rural Health Grants.
HRSA considers counties fully rural when they meet at least one of the following criteria:

• They are non-core counties (neither metro nor micro using the OMB delineation)
• They are micropolitan counties
• They are micropolitan counties
• They are outlying metro counties with no population from an urban area of 50,000 or more people
• All census tracts in the county are FORHP rural

HRSA considers census tracts to be rural when they meet at least one of the following criteria:

• Census tracts in fully rural counties (see county criteria in the previous section)
• Census tracts with Rural Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes 4-10 in metropolitan counties
• Census tracts of at least 400 square miles in area with population density of 35 or fewer people per square mile with RUCA codes 2-3 in metropolitan counties
• Census tracts with RRS 5 and RUCA codes 2-3 that are at least 20 square miles in area in metropolitan counties

The zip code-level data is based on the census tract data. According to HRSA, the data uses a HRSA ZCTA-ZIP code crosswalk to create a list of ZIP codes with FORHP Rural approximations. Some ZIP code points are not included in the ZCTA files. For these, HRSA geocoded the points and identified whether they intersected with a FORHP Rural Health area, then we added them to the final list of FORHP Rural ZIP Code approximations.