Emerging Initiatives

Duke-Margolis seeks to analyze and formulate health solutions. Our focus areas are transforming health care, driving biomedical innovation, and educating the next generation of health leaders. We also pursue emergent issues that will have significant impact on health care. We are seeking funding to support new student initiatives and scholarships focused on health policy, to expand Duke’s community of health policy researchers and faculty, and to establish a Duke Health Policy Action Fund which will provide start-up funds to support innovative health policy scholarship and solutions for the most pressing health care challenges.

2024 Duke-Margolis Emerging Initiatives

Expanding and Spreading State-Based Transformation in and Beyond North Carolina to Improve Health in the South: North Carolina is a leading national model for the shift from “paying for health care services” to “paying for health.” In the past five years, North Carolina policymakers and health care leaders have implemented significant bipartisan health reforms, leading the nation in building innovative programs and supporting infrastructure, especially related to addressing children and families’ health and resource needs (e.g., housing, food) through coordinated, cross-sector models.

Read more here.

This Emerging Initiative is built on foundational work, including these Issue Spotlights:

North Carolina Integrated Care for Kids

Practical Lessons for Implementing the Healthy Opportunities Pilots

Duke Primary Care Transformation Initiative

NC State Transformation Collaborative

Duke-Margolis Cell and Gene Policy Initiative: Leveraging cutting-edge medical science, cell and gene therapies now offer new options for patients with previously untreatable conditions, and are poised to revolutionize the treatment of genetic disorders, cancers, and potentially many chronic diseases. The pipeline of cell and gene therapies is expanding—with thousands of active trials globally, targeting oncology, central nervous system disorders, infectious diseases, sickle cell anemia, and other conditions. Despite this potential, significant challenges exist to advance these novel treatments from labs to the bedsides of the patients with serious and life-threatening conditions that they are designed to help.

Read more here.

This Emerging Initiative is built on foundational work, including these Issue Spotlights:

Clinical Trial Innovation

Clarifying the Pathway for Novel Alzheimer's Disease Drugs

Strengthening Drug Supply Chain Reliability and Leveraging Advanced Manufacturing Technologies

The State of Real-World Evidence

Enabling the Digital Health Revolution: Digital health has the potential to make transformative progress in achieving more accessible, efficient, and personalized health care. Remote tracking apps and devices empower individuals to monitor their health in real-time, fostering preventive care and enabling early intervention. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has captured broad attention and inspired a range of notable commercial and policy-related activities across the health care industry. Generative AI is not only increasingly being used in health care to reduce administrative burdens and operational costs; it is also powering clinical care tools to speed triage, improve diagnosis, help create personalized treatment plans, and assist in providers working at the top of their license. AI can also empower patients to better engage in their health care and shared decision-making. Finally, AI tools can potentially bring down costs and spread access to clinical research and evidence generation, by helping organizations and their interested patients become more “research ready” in terms of data quality, patient engagement, and support for high-quality research practices.

Read more here.

This Emerging Initiative is built on foundational work, including these Issue Spotlights:

Clinical Trial Transformation

Clarifying the Pathway for Novel Alzheimer's Disease Drugs

Strengthening Drug Supply Chain Reliability and Leveraging Advanced Manufacturing Technologies

The State of Real-World Evidence

Developing the Next-Generation Policy Workforce: Improving access to new medical treatments. Eliminating persistent health inequities. Ensuring availability of affordable and high-quality health insurance. Caring for an aging population Mitigating climate change impacts on population health. Preparing for global pandemics. Optimizing the use of artificial intelligence in health care.

These topics are just a few of the pressing health policy challenges affecting society today. Tomorrow’s health policy professionals will come from a broad range of academic disciplines and perspectives, and will need a cross-cutting toolkit of competencies to anticipate, address, and lead reforms on these complex issues effectively. To meet this need, Duke-Margolis developed a core competency framework to help equip the next generation of the health policy workforce with the necessary knowledge, skills, and attributes to improve health, health equity, and health care through practical, innovative, and evidence-based policy.

Read more here.

The foundational work for this Emerging Initiative is our education portfolio, which you can read more about here.

Strengthening Public Health and Health Care Partnerships for the Future: Progress on America’s health has been challenging, despite access to better tools and capabilities to improve health than ever before. The United States has world-leading diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines; increasingly rich and interoperable electronic health data to help patients stay healthier; and many innovative efforts by health care organizations to strengthen primary and preventive care, including care provided at home. Yet, American life expectancy has declined and many health disparities have widened in recent years, alongside rising health care spending with growing challenges in affordability and access. Health care workers are also reporting more burnout and attrition than ever before.

It is time for a more collaborative path forward on improving the nation’s health. In partnership with the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and a leading set of multi-stakeholder collaborators, Duke-Margolis is working to outline a set of feasible, meaningful action steps across health care, public health, and community supports to improve our nation’s capacity to help Americans stay healthy in the near term. These action steps advance the longer-term goal of bringing together public, private, and community organizations to strengthen the nation’s public health capabilities in critical areas of population health need.

Read more here.

This Emerging Initiative is built on foundational work, including these Issue Spotlights:

Public Health 3.0 and Accountable Population Health

Advancing Hepatitis C Elimination

Supporting Traditionally Underserved Populations through Better Safety Net and Home-based Care