Health Impact Project: Advancing Smarter Policies for Healthier Communities

The Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, is a national initiative designed to promote the use of health impact assessments (HIAs) as a decision-making tool for policymakers. HIAs use a flexible, data-driven approach that identifies the health consequences of new policies and develops practical strategies to enhance their health benefits and minimize adverse effects.

The Health Impact Project will promote the use of HIAs by:

• Creating a national center of excellence housed at Pew and providing the coordination and infrastructure needed to establish HIAs as a well-recognized field in the United States;

• Demonstrating the effectiveness of HIAs by funding a series of HIA demonstration projects in various sectors and throughout various regions of the country;

• Building a training and technical assistance network that will support a new group of HIA practitioners and engage and strengthen current HIA practice centers;

• Completing two major federal-level HIAs to address policies of great importance to health in the United States and validate the effectiveness and importance of this tool; and

• Researching and broadly disseminating a review of existing laws, regulations and policies that might support the use of HIAs and help practitioners find new opportunities to implement them.

For more information, please visit: http://www.healthimpactproject.org/