Steven Woolf, MD, MPH

Scholar Project 

The Connecting the Dots initiative aims to raise awareness of the connections between health and social factors, such as education, income, neighborhood, and community. It targets policy makers and voters, whose actions shape these conditions but who rarely understand the full health consequences of their decisions.

Most academics who study health lack experience in the policy world and are poorly equipped to package and deliver messages in a way that is compelling and accessible to policy makers and voters. Dr. Woolf is developing a more effective approach to translating and delivering evidence by forging a collaboration between largely disconnected disciplines:

• researchers who have mastered the scientific evidence linking social factors and health;
• policy experts with intimate knowledge of key change agents and decision-makers and how to reach them;
• communication experts with talent in developing messages and marketing attractive, engaging materials in various media; and
• foundations with a willingness to support the collaboration over five years to test its effectiveness.

Dr. Woolf’s work as a Nova Institute Scholar aims to:

• establish the collaboration;
• demonstrate the ability to reach influential audiences;
• plan for creative products and impactful venues;
• collect data on awareness levels; and
• elicit feedback and learn from target audiences how to provide more useful information.

Raising awareness about the social determinants of health is of urgency amid the current economic crisis, as our society struggles with major decisions affecting social factors, such as employment, education reform, and a fraying social safety net during a time that demands fiscal restraint.

Dr. Woolf’s project seeks to establish a new model for communicating scientific evidence to decision-makers. It will demonstrate the power of formal teamwork among scientists, communication experts, and policy advisors to help audiences understand the relevance of evidence on any health issue. Woolf and his team hypothesize that none of these groups acting alone can communicate as effectively as the product that emerges when these talents join hands.