Modernizing Federal Health Evidence: A Blueprint
The Blueprint is a living document written by AcademyHealth staff. It acts as a prescription for the entire federal health evidence enterprise in this administration and beyond.
The United States federal government runs the most productive health evidence system in the world, providing research funding, surveillance, statistics, program evaluation, and guidance that clinicians, state officials, and policymakers rely on. That system is under strain, and the recent disruption revealed a structural fact rather than a passing problem: much of what protected the system rested on norms rather than law. AcademyHealth’s Modernizing Federal Health Evidence: A Blueprint proposes statutes, institutional designs, and operating practices to whoever holds relevant authority so they can make decisions using trustworthy evidence.
The Blueprint will be updated over time and is designed to be used by this administration and beyond. It provides recommendations to the entire federal health evidence enterprise: the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the states, territories, and tribes whose data the federal system depends on.
The Blueprint is organized around five goals:
- Protect the independence of federal health research
- Modernize the nation’s health data infrastructure
- Secure sustainable and accountable funding for evidence generation
- Build and sustain the evidence workforce
- Embed evidence in policy and practice