• The Health Equity Collective (HEC) celebrated five years of collaborative work for social determinants of health in the Greater Houston region.
• As part of the HEC, we successfully launched two major projects: A closed-loop referral initiative to improve the technological capacity of care coordination in the Houston region, an initiative to strengthen the Community Health Worker workforce, the human capacity of care coordination.
• We secured over $2.5 million in research funding this year for Food Is Medicine research to strengthen the evidence base for healthy food to be a covered medical benefit. We also secured additional funding to strengthen the research program for Medical Legal Partnership. 
• Affiliated faculty continued to conduct cutting-edge research in nutritional epidemiology, to understand diet-disease relationships, and spatial epidemiology, using state-of-the art geospatial data visualization and analysis to shine the light on health disparities in our communities.
• We launched a Community & Stakeholder Engagement Studio and are putting our studio model into action as part of the recently NIH-funded Hospital-based Violence Intervention Program led by Drs. Alex Testa and Sandy McKay. The studio provides a consultative service to researchers to conduct impactful and sustainable community-engaged research.
• We built partnerships with other state and national consortia including American Heart Association Food Is Medicine, Texas Research-to-Policy Collaborative, Texas Consortium on Non-Medical Drivers of Health, and TCHMB.

As we look to the new year, we are building out a robust communications platform, including resource repositories and implementation toolkits to democratize knowledge. Our communications strategy will also include convenings with all of you in various forms over the course of the year to facilitate collaboration and partnerships. In short, we will continue to link arms with our partners to lead, support, or be an ally for health equity. 

We look forward to working together in 2024.

Sincerely, 

Shreela Sharma, PhD, RDN

Director, Center for Health Equity

UTHealth Houston

School of Public Health

Are there any upcoming events or seminars you would like to share with our community? Please email Naomi Tice with more information naomi.tice@uth.tmc.edu