URBAN HEALTH DISPARITIES:

What Might Accountability for Health Equity Goals Look Like?
Unequal Treatment Revisited: The Current State of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare
Big cities need bold and specific plans to end health inequities
Rural-Urban Disparities in Health Care in Medicare

The Financialization of Health in the United States | New England Journal of Medicine

CORE CHALLENGES:

1. Misaligned Incentives: Traditional 5-year funding cycles drive short-term outputs rather than sustained outcomes, often masking the real impact of equity-focused interventions.

No Free Lunch: The Misaligned Incentives of the American Health Care System
Enabling Faster Funding Timelines in the National Institutes of Health

2. Siloed Approaches: Research and care models focus on individual diseases rather than upstream social determinants that impact health outcomes across populations.

Silos in healthcare are bad for us. Here’s the cure
Social Determinants of Health
3 key upstream factors that drive health inequities

3. Fragmented Care Systems: Chicago’s healthcare systems are not integrated—creating gaps in continuity and coordination of care; it is expensive to study the delivery of care as patients move among the various healthcare systems.

Care Fragmentation, Care Continuity, and Care Coordination—How They Differ and Why It Matters
Care Coordination
What is Care Coordination?

4. Barriers to Collaboration: Sustaining partnerships between universities, civic organizations, and community stakeholders is difficult without long-term infrastructure and investment.

NIH Common Fund’s Community Listening Sessions Informing ComPASS: Emerging Themes on Research Gaps and Opportunities
Building Healthy Communities Requires Trustworthiness
Assessing Community Engagement (ACE) Conceptual Model

Collaborators in Health: Redefining Research-Community Partnerships, Chicago 2022-2024