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 interpreted with local context rather than applied as one-size-fits-all solutions.

Simmons described practical actions NADPH takes: using human-centered design to ask “how might we…” instead of issuing top-down edicts; embedding community liaisons who attend local events (she named a community engagement director, Tammy Shepherd, as an example of field staff who builds trust); and partnering with universities and health systems to provide data and computational resources. She said NADPH helps community researchers secure IRB approval and access cohort data, and provides an AI test portal where investigators can try predictive analyses without building infrastructure from scratch.

Simmons said NADPH also works with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions to move ideas to funded research. She gave one example of an HBCU faculty member who had an idea about diabetes in Black women: NADPH helped the researcher get IRB approval, access cohort data from a partner institution and work with the accelerator’s cloud and AI staff to produce a presentation and publishable concept.

The webinar emphasized methods for equitable community engagement. Simmons and Rhodes discussed survey design and qualitative work, noting that static surveys can miss local meaning (for example, participants’ different interpretations of terms such as “balanced meal”). Simmons said NADPH uses focus groups, interviews and free-text collection to preserve context and improve interpretation. She cited a recent outreach evaluation in which nearly all participants returned evaluation surveys and reported getting concrete value from participation.

The organization also leverages volunteers and in-kind expertise: Simmons described NADPH volunteers that include AI and cloud specialists who contribute pro bono time, and she urged nonprofits to treat skilled volunteers as partners rather than low-paid help. NADPH’s STAIRS (Student AI Research Success) program was presented as a pathway to build workforce capacity by training students across STEM and health fields in AI and research methods.

On policy, Simmons said change should be pursued at multiple scales. When high-level ("big P") policy is stalled, she advised organizations to identify local and institutional policy levers — internal procedures, county or state rules, or relationships with Federally Qualified Health Centers — that can be changed or partnered with to scale practices. She also noted that Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) payment rules can affect service availability because providers follow compensation incentives.

Simmons closed by urging practitioners to remember “why” they do the work, to include community members in dissemination and advocacy, and to share authorship and credit with partners and interns so those individuals can advance in research careers. The recording was announced as available on the New Hanover County YouTube channel and NADPH platforms.

The webinar was a discussion and did not include motions or formal votes.