Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Roundtable: Policy Action Hubs Goals to Promote Health and Health Equity

(Health Policy)

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Policies for Action initiative was created to encourage, fund, and disseminate transdisciplinary investigator-initiated research that explores how laws, regulations and other public and private-sector policies advance a Culture of Health. Policies for Action, the successor to the Foundation’s Public Health Law Research Program, will support projects that contribute to the evidence base in three distinct areas: (1) the impact of policies and law on health and equity; (2) health as a consideration and/or consequence for decision-making across all sectors and policies; and (3) the influence of our Culture of Health on policies and policymaking. A key dimension of the Policies for Action initiative is to catalyze the involvement of people whose work is not centered on health. Policies for Action seeks to support “transdisciplinary” research: an integration of theories, methods and tools from diverse fields for the purpose of better addressing social problems. The focus is on policies that are not traditionally or solely within the spheres of health and health care research disciplines. Policies for Action consists of a National Coordinating Center at Temple University’s Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice, and research hubs at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and the Urban Institute. Each hub takes a different approach to integrating health research and expertise from beyond the health tradition. The University of Michigan Ford Hub brings together expertise in economics, health services, political science, sociology and operations research and decision science and will initially study “pay for success” financing and the effects of Health in All Policies. The Wagner Hub at NYU draws heavily on centers of expertise in housing and transportation, linked to data on Medicaid, demonstrating the value of integrating data and expertise beyond health to understand the policy ecology of a major city. The Urban Institute is taking on the question of whether and how well basic income support policies are promoting health and health equity, including analysis of data from three waves of the National Survey of Children’s Health matched by birth cohort, county, and state to historical data from the Census of Governments. The roundtable will describe the Policies for Action framework and the approaches taken by each of the three hubs. The hub leaders will also report on early findings from their research.