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ABOUT US

The Health Security Policy Academy is a policy think tank in the Division of Global Health Equity at Mass General Brigham that aims to protect people around the world from health crises by generating evidence and analysis of the most pressing health security policy challenges of our time--including pandemics, armed conflict & hybrid warfare, environmental health crises, and natural & synthetic biological threats.

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OUR STORY

Over the last 80 years, the global health movement has driven extraordinary gains in human health—expanding access to lifesaving care, strengthening delivery systems, and accelerating the development and distribution of medical innovations. The field of health security strives to secure and build on these remarkable gains in human health by strengthening the resilience of health systems, optimizing the risk-benefit ratio of biomedical innovations, and preventing and mitigating health crises before they materialize.

Harvard and its affiliated institutions are home to a vibrant global health community with a longstanding record of innovation, partnership, and commitment to advancing human health equitably worldwide. Over time, though, we identified a persistent challenge: successful initiatives, advances in medical innovations and health delivery programs are fragile, and easily undone by episodes of crisis or conflict. Frontline practitioners often have key insights about how to protect fragile gains, mitigate harms to critical institutions and systems, and provide responders with the local knowledge they need to secure human health in difficult circumstances. Yet there are limited pathways for practitioners to inform health security policy.

The Health Security Policy Academy was created to address this challenge. Seated in the Division of Global Health Equity in the Department of Internal Medicine at MassGeneral Brigham, the Academy serves as a platform for practitioners—including clinicians, bench researchers, and frontline public health workers—to engage, debate, analyze and inform health security policy issues. Past efforts have included improving the speed of medical countermeasure R&D innovation pipelines, increasing the effectiveness and equity of outbreak investigation capabilities, mitigating the harms to the health of displaced people, enhancing the safety of biosynthetic materials and dangerous pathogens, and increasing the resilience of health systems targeted in armed conflicts and hybrid warfare.

Over the years, we have iterated and refined our approach—strengthening our curriculum, partnerships, and methods—to better equip the greater global health practitioner community to tackle the greatest health security challenges of our age.

HOW WE WORK

I

Framing & Scoping

We explore the policy and governance context of a health secuity issue, identifying the stakeholders, administrative and decision-making processes, and policy levers that can drive change. Products of this work may include quantitative analyses of policy impacts, research reviews, and case studies.

II

Stakeholder Engagement

Policy analysis and formulation are best done ‘in community,’ where all stakeholders can inform the discussion. HSPA convenes stakeholders and facilitates dialogue through multiple forums, including roundtables, workshops, working groups, and conferences. In addition, we regularly engage policy makers in bilateral dialogue regarding legislation relevant to health security, respond to federal agency Requests for Information, and present in global health security forums, summits, and conferences.

III

Solution Iteration & Testing

Some proposed solutions, particularly those involving system redesign or changing the key stakeholders engage with one another, lend themselves to design workshops, table tops, stress-tests, and simulations to test and refine them. We work with emergency operations managers and state and global leaders to design and develop these exercises. When then beta-test products in real-world scenarios to further refine recommendations and tools. We continue to assess impacts of these products and resulting policy changes over time.

IV

Dissemination

We generate potential policy and governance options, tools, frameworks, and data analysis programs to address health security policy problems. We solicit feedback from the stakeholder community on the feasibility and effectiveness of these products. Students, including Harvard University undergraduates, graduate students from HKS, HLS, HMS, and HSPH, and postdoctoral fellows participate as researchers in all our initiatives.