Summary of Categories and Goals

• Scientific Research: Goals and Strategies
• Research-Sustaining Activities: Goals and Strategies
• Outreach, Collaboration, and Dissemination: Goals and Strategies

Scientific Research: Goals and Strategies

Goal 1: Promote research to understand and to improve the health of racial/ethnic minority populations

• Strategy 1.1: Examine health determinants that underlie resilience or susceptibility to diseases and conditions experienced by minority populations.
• Strategy 1.2: Develop and assess interventions to improve the health status of minority populations.

Goal 2: Advance scientific understanding of the causes of health disparities

• Strategy 2.1: Investigate health determinants through basic, behavioral, clinical, and applied research to better understand the contributions to health disparity outcomes.
• Strategy 2.2: Support research to explore multilevel pathways and dynamic interrelationships of health determinants that affect health disparity outcomes over the life course and across generations.
• Strategy 2.3: Identify relevant critical periods and feasible targets for health disparity interventions.

Goal 3: Develop and test interventions to reduce health disparities

• Strategy 3.1: Design and test interventions that target known health determinants within the context of specific populations and appropriate life course time points to influence specific health disparity outcomes.
• Strategy 3.2: Embed implementation science within intervention studies to inform efforts to scale, sustain, and translate efficacious interventions within and across populations and settings.
• Strategy 3.3: Promote prevention and evaluate the impact of upstream interventions on distal health disparity outcomes across the lifespan and across generations.

Goal 4: Create and improve scientific methods, metrics, measures, and tools that support health disparities research

• Strategy 4.1: Identify and test the adoption of common indicators to quantify the status of health disparities across different diseases/conditions and populations.
• Strategy 4.2: Define the continuum from health differences to health disparities, both qualitatively and quantitatively across multiple dimensions, as well as develop contextually informed clinical and statistical measures of disparities reductions.
• Strategy 4.3: Apply complex systems modeling approaches, including biological models, to identify and predict relationships between health determinants and health disparity outcome measures.
• Strategy 4.4: Support movement toward standardization, collection, reporting, and leveraging of measures of health determinants in both existing and emerging data sources, including administrative clinical data, to foster linkages between health, sex and gender, and relevant health determinants data for use in identifying health disparities and underlying causes through emerging techniques found in data science.
• Strategy 4.5: Identify and strengthen rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods to enable analysis on small populations and subpopulations.
• Strategy 4.6: Evaluate minority health and health disparities proposals, programs, and policies to assess the effectiveness in improving minority health and/or reducing health disparities.

Research-Sustaining Activities: Goals and Strategies

Goal 5: Support training to enhance diversity and to promote training and career advancement of minority health and health disparities researchers

Workforce Diversity

• Strategy 5.1: Support individual-level programs to train individuals from health disparity populations in the biomedical sciences.
• Strategy 5.2: Support current and novel institution-level programs at institutions that have a historical and current commitment to educating underrepresented students and at less research-intensive institutions to enhance the ability of these programs to recruit, train, and retain a diverse biomedical research workforce.
• Strategy 5.3: Promote diversity-supporting recruiting programs at research-intensive institutions to expand the pool of applicants from health disparity groups underrepresented in biomedical research.

Minority Health and Health Disparities Scientific Workforce

• Strategy 5.4: Support training and mentorship programs for minority health and health disparities researchers at all stages of career development and leadership development.
• Strategy 5.5: Incorporate development of specialized research skills into health disparities training programs, including core and emerging skills that are important for measuring, understanding, and identifying solutions to address minority health and health disparities complexities.

Goal 6: Strengthen the national capacity to conduct minority health and health disparities research

• Strategy 6.1: Support programs to enhance capacity for minority health and health disparities research at institutions of all sizes.
• Strategy 6.2: Develop and test methods to foster, coordinate, and promote the field of health disparities among research institutions and organizations.

Goal 7: Ensure appropriate representation of minority and other populations experiencing health disparities in NIH-funded research

• Strategy 7.1: Provide guidance, recommendations, and technical assistance for NIH-funded researchers in appropriate study design and best practices for recruitment to ensure compliance with laws, regulations, and policies regarding the inclusion of minorities and other populations experiencing health disparities in research.
• Strategy 7.2: Promote and enforce accountability for inclusion of diverse populations by tracking originally proposed recruitment strategies and objectives to ensure sufficient samples for analyses of subpopulation data.
• Strategy 7.3: Promote inclusion of minorities and other populations experiencing health disparities in big data sets, clinical research, and future big science initiatives.

Outreach, Collaboration, and Dissemination: Goals and Strategies

Goal 8: Promote evidence-based community engagement, dissemination, and implementation of minority health and health disparities research best practices

• Strategy 8.1: Develop and test best practices for dissemination and implementation of minority health and health disparities research discoveries into different settings and with different populations.
• Strategy 8.2: Conduct studies to determine strategies for effective population-specific communication and outreach to inform recruitment and retention into clinical research studies and databases, design of culturally tailored health interventions, and community engagement and participation in research.
• Strategy 8.3: Generate strategies and tools to transform minority health and health disparities best practices into policies.

Goal 9: Cultivate and expand a community of minority health and health disparities researchers and advocates

• Strategy 9.1: Build an NIH interdisciplinary community of scholars around minority health and health disparities research to coordinate disparities science and to foster accountability and integration of minority health and health disparities science within NIH research activities.
• Strategy 9.2: Promote interagency collaboration and coordination with federal departments and agencies, including use of common data elements (CDEs) and data sharing relevant to minority health and health disparities research.
• Strategy 9.3: Establish partnerships with nongovernmental groups (e.g., mentoring networks, advocacy groups, industry and private groups, science communities, grantees) to advance the development, improvement, and utilization of minority health and health disparities definitions, methods, measures, metrics, interventions, and best practices.

Page updated Jan. 12, 2024