Purpose: Meeting the Challenge
Faced with serious risks to health, rising costs and an overburdened health care delivery system, Texans should be able to rely on their universities to provide new solutions to health problems and to inform the actions of their leaders on health matters. Despite the state’s investment in premier academic health science centers, however, little attention has been given to getting the research findings produced by these institutions to those who often need them the most – policymakers and practitioners – in a form that they can use.
The challenge of translating technical findings into meaningful actions and alternatives, and then ensuring that these are widely available, is rarely met. Academic researchers typically have neither the resources, nor the know-how to accomplish this effectively. The primary mission of the Institute for Health Policy is to meet this challenge not only by translating research findings into practical advice for problem solving, but also, more generally, by fostering more productive exchanges between the worlds of academic research and of public health problems and policy concerns.
