Health Equity Design Lab
The Health Equity Design Lab brought together more than 300 stakeholders over four months to produce an evidence base and a comprehensive policy agenda aimed at addressing systemic inequities affecting women’s pay and wealth.
Motivation
Health equity remains one of the most persistent challenges within the public health domain, compounded by complex socio-economic factors such as gender pay and wealth inequities. Addressing these issues requires innovative thinking and collaborative efforts that cut across disciplines and sectors.
The Center for Global Policy Solutions, a policy advocacy organization dedicated to enhancing health equity and economic security, identified a critical need to address the systemic health inequities exacerbated by economic disparities, particularly those affecting women. Recognizing our expertise in data-driven decision-making and collaborative problem-solving, the Center enlisted us to operationalize a comprehensive initiative aimed at catalyzing change in public health policy and practice. The initiative sought not only to facilitate dialogue among various stakeholders but also to translate these discussions into concrete policy agendas capable of driving real change.
Approach
The challenge was to bridge the gap between diverse stakeholders and synthesize a multitude of perspectives into actionable policy recommendations. The project aimed to tackle complex health equity issues through an innovative lens, addressing the nuanced ways in which economic factors like women's pay and wealth disparities impact health outcomes. The primary hurdles included facilitating meaningful collaboration among a wide array of experts, practitioners, and advocates, and translating these dialogues into a cohesive policy agenda.
We started by leading a series of workshops over several months. These sessions were designed to share knowledge, explore innovative solutions, and foster collaboration. We created a structured process for diverse stakeholders to share knowledge, develop actionable recommendations, and agree on a unified policy agenda to advance health equity.
During our research phase, we focused on answering the following questions, identified in pre-meeting interviews with participants. Participants’ responses to these questions were analyzed, and from this analysis, key problem and impact areas were identified and used to shape the HED Lab discussions and meetings.
How were grantees of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) defining equity and health equity?
How were RJWF grantees currently working to advance equity and integrate an equity lens into their work?
What challenges were grantees experiencing when seeking to advance equity, especially when pursuing systems, policy and environmental changes in the context of conducting their RWJF-supported work?
What strategies were grantees using to overcome these challenges in the context of conducting their RWJF-supported work? Were there structural or organizational dimensions that facilitated/hindered a grantee’s ability to overcome challenges?
How could the Foundation optimally support grantee efforts to advance equity?
What was the role of power and privilege in identifying and overcoming the barriers to advancing health equity?
Through its exploration of the research questions, participants in the Health Equity Design Lab identified the following key challenges faced by the health equity field at large:
Solutions being tested in the field were not focusing on the most central issues identified by grantees. Grantee organizations needed to rethink their current efforts and develop strategies to directly address the most pressing problems facing the field and succeed in their overall goals.
A consensus-based, co-creative process that fully engaged health equity practitioners, advocates and community members in identifying policies that promote equity across the social determinants of health at the local, state and federal level was missing from current efforts in the field.
The health equity field needed to push itself to adopt more nimble approaches to experimentation and innovation found in other fields to speed up its cycle of learning and innovation.
After each workshop, we entered a design phase. Over the months, A team of designers, developers, data scientists, and strategists developed and implemented the comprehensive strategy to meet these challenges. Our process ultimately engaged over 300 participants nationwide with the final convening bringing in 250 participants to create, test, and evaluate the components of the final policy agenda.
Collaborative Database Development: A pivotal component of the project was the development of a dynamic database to capture and share the wealth of strategies, insights, and practices discussed. This tool was instrumental in facilitating ongoing collaboration and knowledge exchange beyond the workshops.
Scenario Generation and Fine-Tuning: Utilizing the collaborative database, participants engaged in generating and fine-tuning scenarios for different policy agendas developed during the Strategy Summit. This innovative approach allowed for a dynamic assessment of potential outcomes, enabling participants to iteratively refine their recommendations based on projected impacts and feasibility.
Strategy Summit: The project culminated in a Strategy Summit, where participants divided into teams to develop, refine, and finalize comprehensive policy recommendations. This collaborative process was aimed at establishing a cohesive policy agenda that could unite funders, practitioners, and advocates.
Outcomes
The Health Equity Design Lab initiative led to significant achievements:
Broad Engagement: Successfully convened a diverse group of over 300 thought leaders, leveraging their collective expertise to address critical issues in health equity.
Unified Framework: Established a shared language and framework among participants, facilitating a focused and productive dialogue on health equity challenges.
Innovative Solutions and Scenarios: The collaborative database served as a repository of insights and best practices and a platform for generating and refining policy scenarios, enhancing the robustness and adaptability of the policy recommendations.
Actionable Policy Agenda: Produced a comprehensive policy agenda that addresses women’s pay and wealth inequities through a health equity lens, supported by consensus among key stakeholders.
Read the first report issued by the Health Equity Design Lab and view the summit session presentations.
In an era where our world is ever more tightly woven together, the imperative for inclusive policy-making has never been more urgent. As the forces of globalization thread together our economies, cultures, and lives, the decisions we make ripple outwards, touching lives across continents and communities. It is evident that the crafting of policy must move beyond mere acknowledgment of wide-reaching impacts; it must actively engage and amplify the voices of those historically sidelined or overlooked.
This demand for inclusivity isn't only ethical. It's practical. Policies designed without a holistic, inclusive viewpoint risk not only inefficacy but can dangerously widen the chasms of inequality. And so, it falls upon us to ensure that a mosaic of perspectives shapes our policies, reflecting the nuanced tapestry of our global society and steering us toward solutions that are just, sustainable, and truly resonant with the people they aim to serve. The Health Equity Design Lab’s approach offers a replicable model for other sectors seeking to tackle complex, multifaceted, and interrelated issues through strategic, collaborative innovation.
