CEO Update: The 2026 Snapshot is Almost Here!

It’s officially fall! The leaves are changing, kids are back to school, and Halloween is here.  Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year.  When my daughter was younger, it was so fun to trick-or-treat and I couldn’t wait to see who she wanted to dress up to be. Most years that was Harry Potter or Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.  Now that she’s grown, I get to dress up my dog, Poppy. She doesn’t like it but tolerates it at least long enough for a picture.  You may not know this about me, but I love to scrapbook and I’m always taking pictures.  While CRHC’s Snapshot of Rural Health is not a scrapbook, it does have plenty of pictures that help tell the story of rural health.

If you’ve seen the Snapshot of Rural Health lately, you’ll recognize that it is no longer a “Snapshot” with 2025’s version coming in at 104 pages!  However, I always say it has name recognition.

Yearly, CRHC staff take a significant amount of time to brainstorm ideas for new data to include. We additionally explore any feedback received from individuals that utilized the Snapshot so that new data is included in the next year’s version.  That’s right, CRHC goes through this process each year to ensure that the most accurate and representative rural data is available.  Our goal is that not only is the data available, but it is presented in a way that is understandable, relatable, relevant and often that includes pictures in the form of graphs, infographs, charts and many, many maps.

Typically, the Snapshot of Rural Health is released in late January or early February just in time for our annual visits on the Hill in DC.  However, this year CRHC is aiming to release the Snapshot of Rural just shortly after the start of the new year.  And we have NEW data, including but not limited to:

• • Demographics
    • New Americans
    • Coloradans with Disabilities
  • Changes to Medicaid
  • Medication Assisted Treatment
  • Mental health in the agriculture community
  • Additional data that offers more comparisons between frontier and rural counties

We are only a few more months away until the release of the 2026 version of the Snapshot of Rural Health!  If you need data now and haven’t downloaded the 2025 version of the Snapshot of Rural Health, please visit our website at https://coruralhealth.org/snapshot-of-rural-health.