Primer series
The SDG 3 primer series examines how health informatics, community technology, and community health partnerships improve outcomes for populations excluded from mainstream health systems.
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Primers
Draft for author review
A Seat at the Table: Civic Participation as Health Infrastructure
Jonathan Moore · 2026
Most lists of the social determinants of health name housing, food, income, and care. A quieter one belongs on the list: whether people have real influence over the decisions that shape their lives and their neighborhoods. Civic participation, the genuine kind where residents help decide rather than merely being consulted, turns out to be both a health outcome in itself and a means of producing better health. This…
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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…
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Speaking the Same Language: Common Data Models and the Promise of Shared Evidence
Sigfried Gold, PhD · 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…
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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…
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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…
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What Communities Keep: Governed Knowledge and the Afterlife of Health Projects
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Picture a familiar arc. A university and a community partner win a grant. Over three years they build something genuinely useful: a screening tool, a dashboard, a set of trusted relationships, a body of local knowledge about what works in this particular place. The project is celebrated. Then the grant ends. The faculty lead moves to a new study, the data sits on a server no one maintains, the tool loses its updat…
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