Primer series
The Healthy People series covers community health work, health data and informatics, and the environmental conditions that shape health outcomes.
Follow new publications via the RSS feed.
Primers
Draft
Cooling Is the New Heating: Heat, Health, and the Air-Conditioning Gap
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
For most of the modern history of energy assistance, the danger to watch was cold. Programs were built around winter, around keeping the heat on, around the documented harms of a cold home. That framing is increasingly out of step with current conditions. Extreme heat is now the fastest-growing weather-related health threat in much of the country, and the systems meant to protect vulnerable households were largely…
Read primer →Draft for author review
Counting What Counts: Standardizing the Data Behind the Social Determinants of Health
Amber Avery, PhD · 2026
There is broad agreement that the conditions in which people live, work, and age, the social determinants of health, explain a large share of health outcomes, often more than clinical care itself. Housing, food security, transportation, income, and social connection shape who gets sick and who recovers. The agreement is near-universal. And yet the health system records this information so inconsistently that it ca…
Read primer →Draft
Power Reliability as Clinical Infrastructure
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
A growing share of serious medical care now happens at home rather than in a hospital. This is mostly good news. People recover better and live more independently in their own homes, and home-based care costs the system less. But it quietly rests on an assumption that rarely gets examined: that the electricity will stay on.
Read primer →Draft for author review
Speaking the Same Language: Common Data Models and the Promise of Shared Evidence
· 2026
Ask two hospitals the same clinical question, say, how often a particular medication is followed by a particular complication, and you will often get answers that cannot be compared. Not because the medicine differs, but because each institution records its data in its own structure, with its own codes, its own conventions, its own quiet assumptions. The information is there. It simply does not speak a common lang…
Read primer →Draft
The Generative City Is a Healthy City: Designing Places That Keep Producing Health
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
A person's health is shaped far more by where they live than by where they are treated. The walkability of a neighborhood, the quality of its housing, the air it breathes, the ease of reaching a job or a clinic or a park: these decide the baseline of a population's health long before any medical encounter. The clinic repairs; the city produces. This primer is about taking that seriously, and about a particular way…
Read primer →Draft for author review
The Trusted Bridge: Community Health Workers and the Infrastructure of Trust
Katrina Polk, PhD · 2026
Most of what determines a person's health happens before they ever reach a doctor: where they live, whether they can get to an appointment, whether the prescription is affordable, whether anyone at home understands the diagnosis. The clinical encounter is brief and occasional. The life around it is constant. Bridging that gap is the work of community health workers, and this primer is about why that role is one of…
Read primer →