NADPH urges community-led design to make precision health accessible

Malaika Simmons, chief operating officer of the National Accelerator for Discovery and Precision Health (NADPH), told a New Hanover County webinar that precision health must be built with communities, not done to them.

“Health care is advancing faster than ever. But here's the truth. Innovation without equity can actually widen the gap,” host Vaughn Rhodes said at the start of the program. Simmons highlighted NADPH’s approach: “it's an approach to health care that uses all of the characteristics of that individual to make health care decisions,” she said, naming environment, lifestyle and genetics as inputs that should shape care.

NADPH’s model centers people with lived experience at every stage of the data life cycle, Simmons said. The organization breaks the process into eight phases — planning, collecting, access, analyzing, interpreting, recommending, reporting and disseminating — and aims to include community members, patient navigators and community health workers in each phase so findings are…