Area Resource File, 2006

The Area Resource File is made available by the Bureau of Health Professions. The basic county-specific Area Resource File (ARF) is the nucleus of the overall ARF System. It is a database containing more than 6,000 variables for each of the nation's counties. ARF contains information on health facilities, health professions, measures of resource scarcity, health status, economic activity, health training programs, and socioeconomic and environmental characteristics. In addition, the basic file contains geographic codes and descriptors which enable it to be linked to many other files and to aggregate counties into various geographic groupings.