b'Where Are We Now?Early in the development of Vision 2020 , the Council for a Healthier Community selected 38 indicators to measure the health of the community. V2020 work groups identified several additional indicators of local interest. Since then, the community health field, Vision 2020, and public health datasets have evolved a great deal. For instance, Vision 2020 has clarified its priority areas and shifted from planning to action, and has conducted two rounds of its Community Health Survey in 2010 and 2012. Methodological changes to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) a key source of many of our indicators make current and future values incomparable to those from previous years. In addition, we no longer have access to some of the other original indicators. So, in line with national best practices, we refined our list to a set of core indicators using the following criteria:1) perceived importance at the national level (as judged by its use in prominent health initiatives such as Healthy People 2020);2) ongoing availability at the county, and preferably also state and national levels; and3) alignment with Vision 2020 target areas. Although our focus moving forward will remain with the core indicators, we will continue to track an expanded list of locally relevant indicators on the Vision 2020 website.The table below shows, whenever available, the year the data was collected; the Vision 2020 target (the Healthiest Community Advisory Board is still working on setting targets for some of the newer indicators)and target area; and the current values at the county, state, and national levels for each of our core indicators. The Vision 2020 symbol in the last column tells you that the Cheshire County value is better than the national benchmark.I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.Lord Kelvin, 1883. British mathematician and physicist who determined the value of absolute zero.12 13'