Center for Health Impact Evaluation (CHIE)

The goals of NACCHO's HIA Project are to increase local health department (LHD) staff training and experience in HIA, promote the use of HIA at local health departments, improve community design and built environment decisions by increasing the consideration of health, and ultimately improve community health. Through its HIA project, NACCHO works to achieve these goals by assisting LHDs in increasing the use of HIA in community design, transportation, parks and recreation, housing, and land use planning decisions, among others.  

The World Health Organization showcases HIAs from multiple sectors, including agriculture, air, culture, development, energy, housing, mining, noise, social welfare, tourism, transport and communications, waste, and water. WHO maintains a strong relationship with the International Association for Impact Assessment; it has also published reports on HIA methodology development and mechanisms for building HIA capacity.  

The Pew Charitable Trusts is an organization that strives to improve public policy by conducting rigorous analysis, linking diverse interests to pursue common causes and to inform the public by providing useful data that illuminate the issues and trends shaping our world. Pew has developed a comprehensive guide to support practitioners in the field by describing the key tasks and activities for HIA, as well as the issues and challenges that arise in the course of practice.  

SOPHIA is an international association of individuals and organizations that provides leadership and promotes excellence in the field of HIA. They develop resources that help build HIA practitioner capacity; support peer mentoring opportunities; and keep members up to date on resources, training, and technical assistance opportunities. SOPHIA is open to HIA and Health in All Policies (HiAP) practitioners, researchers, and advocates with all levels of experience. By promoting the thorough and systematic consideration of health in decision-making across a range of sectors, SOPHIA works to reduce health inequities and achieve better health for all.  

This collection of economics tools is maintained by the CDC's Center for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support. It provides links to a variety of tools developed by health economists to calculate, among others, the costs of various illnesses, demands for service during a pandemic, and the costs and benefits of changing regulations on HIV screening among new immigrants to the US. In addition, the page directs users to health economics training and other resources relevant to economic evaluation in public health.  

HERC assists VA researchers in assessing the cost-effectiveness of medical care, evaluating the efficiency of programs and providers, and conducting health economics research. Their website includes various resources describing the basic concepts and methods used in health economics, archives of webinars and online courses given by VA researchers, and a database of health economics publications.  

Online course with content describing the scope of health economics, the US health care system, and a guide to identify and assess the quality of health economics studies and related publications.  

Public Health Systems Research (PHSR) is an emerging discipline that examines the organization, financing, and delivery of public health services, as well as the impact of these activities on population health. The PHSR website provides an overview of the field and links to various training and research resources from the PHSR community. The group holds a meeting every year in conjunction with Academy Health's Annual Research Meeting.   PHSR Link

This paper outlines the context for systems science, opportunities for the application of systems science in public health, and ways of moving the field of systems science forward in the public health realm.  

This paper outlines simulation modeling in healthcare and provides insight into systems science. It sought examples of work that demonstrate how systems science methods have been used to engage practical challenges and opportunities within real-world organizational settings.  

This article proposes considered futures for the use of simulation as a problem solving technique within healthcare settings, and presents options for how simulation could be used within the healthcare domain. Such options or futures could assist in identifying the critical barriers toward having a successful strategy and provide the basis for debate that will be necessary to attain it.  

On April 9, 2015, the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement in Washington, DC held a workshop exploring how modeling can inform strategies to improve population health. The workshop included a dialogue between modelers from a range of disciplines and model users, with a focus on making practical contributions to move modeling forward in population health at local, state, and federal levels, including strategies to build capacity for modeling.