Table 2.
Strategies for Applying a Cyclical Approach to Reducing Health Disparities
| Overall |
| Train a multidisciplinary research workforce that includes researchers who are health disparity subject matter specialists and researchers who can iteratively integrate big and other data, apply data science, and translate and visualize results. |
| Establish organizational structures to involve all stakeholders on an ongoing basis. |
| Promote a data-driven iterative approach to identifying and mitigating health disparities. |
| Adapt the “learning healthcare systems” approach to focus on health disparity research. |
| Engage social entrepreneurs and information technology, data science, and other sectors not traditionally engaged with health disparities. |
| Collaborate in ways that does no harm to individuals or communities and builds mutual understanding, respect, and trust. |
| Data Integration and Etiology |
| Develop data science laboratories that can conduct health disparity simulation/complex systems modeling. |
| Incorporate features and parameters related to health disparities into electronic health record systems. |
| Identify and make available reference data sets that can be reused according to the FAIR principles. |
| Ensure data quality and integrity (e.g., align definitions of race and ethnicity) before data aggregation and analysis. |
| Interventions |
| Develop outreach mechanisms that fully discuss and illustrate interventions to build community trust. |
| Pilot interventions before full-scale implementation, considering ethical and cultural issues. |
| Evaluation |
| Conduct scientific evaluation (e.g., hypothesis testing) throughout the process. |
| Review progress with respect to the NIMHD Research Framework2 and recommend actions relevant to the framework. |
| Conduct iterative process evaluation. |
| Review cost benefit of big data driven translational research cycles against traditional forms of health disparity intervention research and development. |
FAIR, findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable; NIMHD, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.