Health Equity

2024 was a year of progress for members, featuring new resources like the Salary Comparison Tool and Report, the AI for health research course, and the launch of the Future of Health Equity Webinar Series. We’re excited to expand on these achievements in 2025.

Significant investments in community health begin with reforming funding approaches and scaling programs that center a community’s experiential knowledge. Participatory grant-making and peer health navigation are two examples of promising health services research approaches that deserve more attention.

Building on a previous call to integrate oral health into health care systems and policy frameworks, the Oral Health Interest Group (OHIG) aims to foster interdisciplinary collaborations, reduce disparities, and drive policy innovation ahead of the 2025 Annual Research Meeting.

In the fourth of a series of interviews with our Community Research for Health Equity grantees, AcademyHealth interviews Kristin Payestewa from Arizona State University to learn more about their project goals and findings during National Native American Heritage Month.

In this blog post, Dr. Ayaz Hyder of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding explores how a community-based system dynamics (CBSD) approach enables facilitators to deeply understand and collaboratively address complex issues. This methodology fosters a more inclusive and insightful problem-solving environment by uniquely centering the community throughout the entire modeling process.

There has been an uptick in private equity firm investment in health care with recent attention being drawn to behavioral health services. Research on the impacts of commercialization of behavioral health is almost non-existent, leaving gaps in how this investment trend may affect access to care for communities of color.

In the third of a series of interviews with our Community Research for Health Equity grantees, AcademyHealth interviews Dennis Heaphy and Taline Alonso from Disability Policy Consortium to learn more about their project goals and findings during National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

AcademyHealth, with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, awarded four grants to study and address diagnostic inequities and improve patient outcomes in behavioral health, cardiology, pediatrics, and oncology.

The new Scholars will provide thought leadership on reproductive health issues within the health services research field and provide expert guidance to the recently launched Research Community on the Equity Impacts of Dobbs.

Research in health services is essential for informing policy decisions to address and forestall the detrimental health consequences of climate change. Part 2 of this blog series identifies priority health services research areas for continued health system reform to address the climate crisis.