By the NIH ComPASS Program
With its launch in September 2023, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) program began support of a first-of-its-kind community-led research program to study how underlying structural factors within communities affect health. The NIH is directly funding community organizations to study how factors such as access to healthy food, transportation, safe spaces, employment opportunities, and quality health care can impact health outcomes.
This summer the NIH also funded five new ComPASS Health Equity Research Hubs, to provide local technical assistance and scientific support to the Community-Led, Health Equity Structural Intervention (CHESI) projects. The Hubs will also support partnerships among ComPASS entities, research capacity- building, and training. The ComPASS program is made up of three complementary initiatives, including the Hubs, the CHESIs, and the ComPASS Coordination Center (the latter two were awarded last September).
Advancing health equity requires a sustained focus on addressing the social determinants of health. These are the conditions in which people are born, grow, learn, work, play, live, and age, as well as the wider set of structural factors shaping the conditions of daily life. The CHESI awards focus on developing structural interventions — efforts to change the social, physical, economic, or policy environments that may shape health behaviors and create differences in opportunities to achieving optimal health. Community organizations and their research partners are working together to develop a structural intervention, launch it within their community, and then assess whether the intervention improves health outcomes.
The CHESIs are addressing structural barriers to reduce health disparities and achieve health equity. These efforts align with the goals of the AAMC Center for Health Justice. For example, several of the CHESI-awarded projects are exploring the impact of increasing access to telehealth services, particularly for rural, geographically isolated communities. One intervention focuses on agricultural workers and will test whether internet access improves virtual health care systems for this at-risk population. Another CHESI project, located in Mississippi, plans to expand the broadband internet infrastructure to increase health care access and to address cardiovascular and reproductive health among Black adults. In Texas, a CHESI project is improving nutrition for chronic disease prevention and management by working with federally qualified health centers to implement culturally appropriate food-is-medicine programs for those experiencing food insecurity. Focusing on transportation equity and health care access, an Arkansas-based CHESI project is ensuring people have reliable and timely transportation to cancer-screening appointments.
Organizations that received a CHESI award are located across the country. For more details on each award, visit the ComPASS Funded Research page.
Through the ComPASS Program, the NIH will gain valuable insights into how to support successful community-led health research in the future. Each project will also contribute valuable data to a growing body of knowledge about social determinants of health and structural inequities.
The ComPASS program is funded by the NIH Common Fund and managed collaboratively by NIH staff from the Common Fund; the National Cancer Institute; the National Institute of Mental Health; the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities; the National Institute of Nursing Research; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; and the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health, with many other NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices participating in program development and management. More information is available on the ComPASS program website.