As part of AcademyHealth’s Paradigm Project, volunteer “design teams” spent two years generating and testing innovations to disrupt the status quo in health services research. Teams leveraged the tools of human-centered design (HCD) to address structural challenges facing the field, such as barriers to studying the questions of interest to decision-makers, getting the evidence to end-users in a timely, accessible way, and addressing long-standing issues of inequity and bias in the workforce and methods.

One Design Team tasked with enhancing the implementation of health services research focused on the important role of community members in using evidence-based interventions to address health equity issues of priority in that community. This team developed the concept for a Health Equity Incubator, which would support the collaboration of a health care delivery organization, researcher, and community-based organization (CBO) to address a health equity issue—with the CBO at the center.

Watch the video below to learn more about the Health Equity Incubator and lessons learned from testing the concept.

Learn more about the larger movement to advance more timely, impactful research, and the other four innovations resulting from the Paradigm Project: