The Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) approved a $50,000 grant for AcademyHealth to organize a "Health Policy Salon Series" during 2021 to spark momentum at the federal level on the three policy targets for JHF's Full Court Press initiative. These three policy areas include creating a National Patient & Provider Safety Authority (NPSA) to apply creative technology solutions to the problem of patient safety, changing the financial and regulatory policies to redesign residential services for frail seniors, and advancing policy changes related to WIC, midwives, and perinatal Community Health Workers to develop a comprehensive approach to pregnancy and postpartum care.
The AcademyHealth Salon Series will include one Salon session for each Full Court Press policy objective, and all three Salons will occur during the first quarter of 2021. The Salons are modeled after policy forums that Judy Miller Jones, MA, Director of the National Health Policy Forum at George Washington University, used to create for legislators and key staffers on the Hill. These forums created a closed, off-the-record space for the policymakers and their key staff members to learn about issues and policy solutions.
AcademyHealth's national reputation for being evidence-based and engaging the right people will allow them to successfully organize the Salon series. Since its inception, AcademyHealth has been advancing the field of health services research by acting as an objective broker of information, bringing together stakeholders to address the current and future needs of an evolving health system and to inform health policy and practice. JHF has worked with AcademyHealth over the years to organize similar policy forums. Most recently, this included the adolescent behavioral health policy summit in 2019 that produced a national policy playbook endorsed by key stakeholders.
The closed-door Health Policy Salons will be designed to raise awareness of JHF's Full Court Press policy issues and spark a discussion about the evidence-based policy options to address them. All activities will be virtual, bi-partisan, and draw on the latest evidence available from the field of health services research, existing policy recommendations, and models of success. Following each Salon, AcademyHealth will anonymize and synthesize the discussion, priorities, and action items into visual evidence briefs. These briefs will include shareable infographics for distribution to relevant policymaking audiences and other key stakeholders who can advance the solutions.