For decades, AcademyHealth has been the professional home for health services and policy research. We convene the community, advocate for the field, and work to ensure that evidence reaches the decisions it is meant to improve.
Today, we are taking that work further.
We are proud to announce the launch of AcademyHealth's four Signature Program Centers:
- the Health Services Research Acceleration Center,
- the Champions of Evidence Center,
- the Evidence into Policy Center, and
- the Innovation Adoption Center.
Together, these Centers represent the most significant evolution of AcademyHealth's programmatic work in the organization's history and a direct expression of our 2025-2030 strategic plan's commitment to elevating the profession, broadening our reach, and focusing on impact.
"The health services research community has never been more capable or more motivated,” said Elizabeth Cope, AcademyHealth’s Chief Programs & Science Officer. “The missing piece has never been talent or will. It has been the shared infrastructure, the human capacity, and the sustained connections needed to move evidence into the decisions that determine people's health. That is what these Centers exist to build."
Health Services Research Acceleration Center: Powering the evidence our field depends on.
Health services research has the potential to answer the questions that would transform how we invest in health and health care, but only if researchers have access to the data, networks, and resources to ask those questions in the first place. Right now, that infrastructure is fragmented. Data are scattered. Researchers working on the same problems rarely find each other. This Center, which will be led by recently hired Senior Director Kamila Mistry, who joins AcademyHealth in July, builds what the field needs: shared data systems, coordinated multi-site research networks like the State-University Partnership Learning Network and the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network, investigator matchmaking, and funding mechanisms that pool resources around shared challenges.
Champions of Evidence Center: Equipping the people who make evidence matter.
Led by Senior Director Megan Collado and Director Danielle DeCosta, this center addresses an equally fundamental problem on the human side. Researchers are trained to publish, not to translate. Decisionmakers are expected to interpret evidence they were never taught to read. The gap between what science shows and what policy and practice does is, in part, a skills problem — and no one has made it their mission to solve it on both sides simultaneously. This Center does, building a professional community where being a champion for evidence is the shared norm, not the exceptional achievement.
Evidence into Policy Center: The right evidence, in the right hands, right now.
Led by Vice President Michael Gluck and Director Amanda Brodt, exists to answer a question policymakers face every day: when a high-stakes decision is two weeks away and the evidence is conflicting, who do you call? This Center activates AcademyHealth's research community in response to real-time policy need, drawing on two decades of trusted, nonpartisan relationships with state and federal policymakers built through programs like the Medicaid Medical Directors Network.
Innovation Adoption Center: Building the movements that change care.
Led by Cope and Senior Manager Sarah Hoyt, this center addresses the final gap: the distance between proven innovations and standard practice. Every patient deserves care that reflects what science already makes possible, but changing what happens in exam rooms and insurance offices requires everyone who needs to move to move together. Doctors, insurers, researchers, patient communities, and policymakers, simultaneously, in coordination, toward a shared goal. This Center builds the coalitions that make that coordination possible and sustains them until change is inevitable.
What comes next
The four Centers are soft-launching this week at AcademyHealth's Annual Research Meeting in Seattle, where the health services research community is gathering for the first-ever Health Services Research Week. A full public launch is planned for Fall 2026.
“This is what it looks like when a professional community stops just convening around a problem and starts taking responsibility for solving it,” said AcademyHealth President and CEO Aaron Carroll. “We are grateful to the researchers, policymakers, funders, and partners who have helped make this work possible and we look forward to building it together.”