read_health_region: Download spatial data of Brazilian health regions and health...

In geobr: Download Official Spatial Data Sets of Brazil

Download spatial data of Brazilian health regions and health macro regions

Description

Health regions are used to guide the the regional and state planning of health services. Macro health regions, in particular, are used to guide the planning of high complexity #' health services. These services involve larger economics of scale and are concentrated in few municipalities because they are generally more technology intensive, costly and face shortages of specialized professionals. A macro region comprises one or more health regions.

Usage

read_health_region(
  year,
  code_state = "all",
  geometry_level = "municipality",
  macro = NULL,
  simplified = TRUE,
  output = "sf",
  showProgress = TRUE,
  cache = TRUE,
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

year	Numeric. Year of the data in YYYY format. It defaults to NULL and reads the data from the latest year available.
code_state	The two-digit code of a state or a two-letter uppercase abbreviation (e.g. 33 or "RJ"). If code_state="all" (the default), the function downloads all states.
geometry_level	String. Spatial level of the output geometries. Use "municipality" to return municipal geometries (default), "micro" to aggregate geometries by health region, or "macro" to aggregate geometries by health macroregion.
macro	The argument macro has been deprecated.
simplified	Logic FALSE or TRUE, indicating whether the function should return the data set with 'original' spatial resolution or a data set with 'simplified' geometry. Defaults to TRUE. For spatial analysis and statistics users should set simplified = FALSE. Borders have been simplified by removing vertices of borders using ⁠st_simplify{sf}⁠ preserving topology with a dTolerance of 100.
output	String. Type of object returned by the function. Defaults to "sf", which loads the data into memory as an sf object. Alternatively, "duckdb" returns a lazy spatial table backed by DuckDB via the duckspatial package, and "arrow" returns an Arrow dataset. Both "duckdb" and "arrow" support out-of-memory processing of large data sets.
showProgress	Logical. Defaults to TRUE display progress bar.
cache	Logical. Whether the function should read the data cached locally, which is faster. Defaults to cache = TRUE. By default, geobr stores data files in a temporary directory that exists only within each R session. If cache = FALSE, the function will download the data again and overwrite the local file.
verbose	A logical. If TRUE (the default), the function prints informative messages and shows download progress bar. If FALSE, the function is silent.

Value

An ⁠"sf" "data.frame"⁠ OR an ArrowObject

Examples

# Read municipalities with info on health regions
health_muni <- read_health_region(year = 2024)

# Read the geometries of micro regions
health_micro <- read_health_region(
  year = 2024,
  geometry_level = "micro"
  )

# Read the geometries of macro regions
health_macro <- read_health_region(
  year = 2024,
  geometry_level = "macro"
)

geobr documentation built on May 20, 2026, 5:08 p.m.