Highlights from Data Foundation’s Convening to Amplify Health Innovation

How can data and technology be best leveraged to improve the health and wellness of Americans? At Capital Factory in Austin, Texas, the Data Foundation brought together health researchers, policy veterans, and entrepreneurs to help answer this question. The day was an examination of how data-driven initiatives are “Amplifying Health Innovation” in America. These speakers discussed the important role data and emerging technologies are playing in making meaningful transformations in promoting food security, nutrition literacy, reducing chronic disease, and more. 

Moving From Data to Action

Throughout our panels, speakers emphasized that meaningful transformations rely heavily on long-term commitments of time, resources, and political will — data and innovative systems cannot solve complex health problems alone. 

Bill Hoagland, Senior Vice President for the Bipartisan Policy Center and former administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service at the Department of Agriculture, began the event by sharing his firsthand perspective from implementing the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) system for SNAP, which required decades of commitment across multiple administrations. This transformation wasn't driven by data collection alone, but by demonstrating tangible benefits through use cases, successful pilot projects, and engaging decision-makers to build trust in what the evidence showed. The outcome of that trust and commitment was the evolution of nutrition assistance over the course of two decades; EBT cards have successfully increased accessibility to nutrition assistance, reduced administrative burden, and decreased the fraud that came with traditional food stamps.

Building Bridges Between Communities and Resources

Charles Miller, Director of Health and Economic Mobility Policy for Texas 2036, discussed his organization's research on the uninsured in Texas on a panel exploring community health with Dr. Tara Karns-Wright, Assistant Professor at UT Health San Antonio and Director at Be Well Texas. When examining why Texas has the nation's worst uninsured rate, Miller’s team at Texas 2036 found that cost wasn't the primary barrier to insurance enrollment — 40% of uninsured Texans were eligible for free plans but hadn't signed up due to lack of awareness or misconceptions that  "insurance is not for people like me. It's like a luxury handbag." Systems are available to help the uninsured population, but a lack of communication and trust has proved a significant barrier to connecting those in need to effective programs, Miller said. 

Dr. Karns-Wright described her team's approach to overcoming similar barriers. She described their work on the Texas Targeted Opioid Response program as being "the mortar between the bricks," providing infrastructure that brings together disparate public health programs and community providers, pools data and knowledge about community needs, and then helping individuals-in-need plug into the networks. "We want our partner providers in the community to be the first line of service, but if they can't be, we're there to back them up," she explained.

This community-centered approach acknowledges a key challenge identified by multiple speakers over the course of the day: fractured data governance systems. Public-facing organizations and government agencies collect information in different ways with little incentive to share, creating silos that prevent holistic understanding of health challenges and effective targeting of communities in need. Breaking down these barriers requires both technical solutions and governance structures that incentivize collaboration. "If we want to get two agencies that have two different parts of the story available to them to share that information with each other, we have to go beat them over the head repeatedly," Miller explained.

They closed the panel conveying the crucial importance of keeping messages simple, actively listening to the people being served, and connecting with audiences in ways that feel authentic and relatable to their lived experiences.

Developing Trust in Technology: Meeting People Where They Are

Later in the day, a separate panel centered around how to develop trust when introducing technology platforms as part of health and nutrition solutions. Speakers emphasized that trust requires meeting people where they are and taking a measured approach to introducing technology and requesting personal data. When told to “eat healthy,” everyone is coming from very different backgrounds, with exposure to many different sources of information — some based in evidence, some not. Naomi Nix from the Washington Post said, "Scientific research is something that's very difficult for the average person to understand. More and more people are turning to social media to understand the news around them, and not necessarily your mainstream news sources." The challenge of defining what is “healthy,” as Marissa Burgermaster from Dell Medical School explained, is not a lack of research knowledge, but implementation in the public. 

Elijah Kelley, Chief Strategy and Product Officer for Yumlish, explained how health information is complex to analyze, and the resources of money, time, and education required to interpret health data are not available to everyone, creating an uneven playing field. In his experience promoting Yumlish’s diabetes prevention programs, he has found that “dosing” technological complexity into a program as gradually as possible is often best. He explained Yumlish’s intentional approach to designing technology for underserved populations: "If you saw the interface of our application, you would think it was something from the 1990s. But that's very intentional. There's an inundation of competition for attention, and it's quite difficult to say to a person 'we're going to give you a really complex, long-term behavior change process.'"

Building the Infrastructure for Collaboration

Over the course of this event, speakers repeatedly returned to the need for open, collaborative infrastructure that brings together data and evidence on health and nutrition. Accessible, high-quality information is increasingly needed to find new, meaningful solutions to America’s health challenges, and the Data Foundation recognizes the urgency of this challenge. That is why the Data Foundation partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a two-year initiative to create a pilot open data repository and develop a cross-sector learning agenda to advance evidence-informed decision-making across government, business, and research communities.

The data repository project — which was  previewed at the event — aims to address these challenges by providing a centralized platform where researchers, policymakers, and practitioners can access comprehensive nutrition data, share insights, and collaborate on evidence-based solutions. The platform will serve as mortar for public health professionals to bind together key health and nutrition initiatives across sectors.

The speakers at this event demonstrated that transforming America's approach to nutrition and health requires more than just collecting data; it demands building trust through consistent engagement with communities, breaking down institutional silos, and creating infrastructure that connects resources to the people who need them most. By bringing together diverse perspectives from research, policy, and technology, we can develop solutions that address not just the symptoms but the underlying causes of our nation's health challenges.