One way AcademyHealth works to improve both the supply and quality of health services research is by assessing the skills and composition of the HSR workforce, and building programs that respond to emerging needs. This section includes evidence on the makeup of the HSR workforce as well as programs to improve and support its diversity and relevance.
The communities most impacted by health policy are too often excluded from shaping it. Meanwhile, community-informed research is producing powerful evidence that rarely reaches the policy and legal spaces where decisions are made. Closing that gap is both an urgent challenge and one of the most important opportunities for advancing health equity today.
As health care systems across the United States face staffing shortages, burnout, and growing demand for care, workforce issues have become increasingly important to the future of health care. The 2026 ARM will feature workforce-focused sessions examining how working conditions affect both health care workers and the quality of care patients receive.
Health services research (HSR) shapes decisions that affect care, policy, and communities every day, yet the field is often invisible to those outside of it. HSR Week is a new AcademyHealth initiative created to celebrate the people behind this work and help make the impact of HSR easier to see and understand.
Health services research (HSR) helps ensure that health care works better in the real world, closing the gap between what we know and what people experience. This one-pager explains how HSR identifies what works, improves care delivery, and supports smarter decisions across the health system.
Research dissemination is often the final step in a project, considered in the moment when findings are packaged and delivered, rather than throughout the work itself. AcademyHealth’s 10-year effort to support policy communications and community-engaged research, emphasized a key lesson: how we share knowledge is just as important as what we discover.
In a recent conversation on the Analyzing Healthcare podcast AcademyHealth President and CEO Aaron Carroll offered a candid look at the challenges and opportunities facing the U.S. health system today. Carroll emphasized that today’s health care debate requires more than simple narratives. It requires evidence and leadership committed to long‑term solutions.
AcademyHealth will administer a communications and policy capacity building program for Humana Foundation research grantee partners to equip and empower researchers to leverage their research insights for real public health or health care policy and practice change.
AcademyHealth highlights four new projects at the UNC Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center that will generate timely evidence on key behavioral health workforce challenges. AcademyHealth will support dissemination of findings to the health services research community.
A recent change to federal student loan policy is poised to reshape the health workforce in consequential ways. By excluding nursing and several allied health fields from its definition of “professional degree programs,” the Department of Education risks narrowing who can enter the profession and weakening the pipeline of future clinicians.
