Knowledge to Action and the Business of Health

Knowledge to Action and the Business of Health

This cluster will address the pressing social need of achieving better health outcomes in light of ever-rising health spending. Promising discoveries for meeting this challenge often fail to become widely adopted in the face of numerous complexities. By leveraging the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative and the learning health system hubs at Johns Hopkins, this transdisciplinary cluster will generate solutions aimed at aligning incentives and integrating the science of systems, economics, and management.


Our investment

This cluster’s investment in research includes: 4 Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships and 4 junior faculty positions.  These faculty, along with the cluster leads, will collaborate together along with existing Johns Hopkins faculty on this important area of research.


Although significant progress has been made to bolster the productivity of the pipeline for translating biomedical knowledge to clinical knowledge, the problem of moving clinical knowledge into practice remains. This cluster is focused on advancing the scholarship of identifying, incentivizing, and scaling solutions that will help close the evidence-practice gap and advance health in the US affordably and equitably.

Interested in this cluster? Contact us to learn more.

This cluster seeks to leverage the exceptional community of scholars at Johns Hopkins by bringing together distinguished faculty that have an appetite for understanding the social, technical, and decision-making dynamics of complex systems and can lead in identifying, incentivizing, and scaling high-value health innovations to improve health.

This will require recruiting an interdisciplinary team of prominent applied scientists specializing in economics, management, and health services, research sharing the vision of a healthier America, supported by an affordable and equitable, high-value health system. The cluster aims to increase attention on matters of complexity, and on the knowing-to-doing gap in order to close it through individual and collective action, producing “knowledge for the world.”

This cluster will hire integrative scholars who share a passion for addressing the big picture of how to best distribute limited resources for optimal health and optimize translation of knowledge into action, and have the track record for breakthrough research in fundamental disciplines of economics, management, and health services research.

Cluster scholars will have expertise in at least one of these areas:

  • Management and Organizations Science
  • Health Economics and Health Policy Research
  • Health Services Research
  • Systems and Decision Science

With multiple investments to bridge disciplines, Johns Hopkins University is uniquely poised for a BDP cluster to catalyze beneficial health outcomes from advancing dynamic learning system strategies by harnessing the strengths of the institution with the infusion of distinguished scholars who can unlock solutions and insights previously unexplored. The university is the proud home of three world-renowned health schools: The Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Medicine, and the School of Nursing. It is the leading academic health brand in the world. Johns Hopkins Medicine, at the forefront of health care innovation and discovery, provides an environment in which the cluster can study high-value health system interventions and integrated health delivery. Johns Hopkins is also the home of a relatively new business school, the Carey Business School, that seeks to be the nation’s leader in business of health education and scholarship. If the U.S. health system is to transform into the most productive and admired health system in the world, Hopkins must be at the front of this effort.

The cluster will build on the recently launched Hopkins Business of Health Initiative (HBHI) to unite scholars in the business of health across the University. HBHI was established to integrate research, practice, and policy to improve the American health system by striving for a healthier America, supported by an affordable and equitable, high-value health system. This interdisciplinary, collaborative environment provides a fertile ecosystem for addressing big questions. HBHI will unite the scholarship and scholars that share the vision of this cluster. Cluster scholars will help harness HBHI’s existing strengths and address pressing societal issues the United States faces.

Active engagement of three major translation-oriented hubs at Johns Hopkins—the APL’s National Health Mission Area, the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research—will support cluster efforts. In addition, the proximity of Johns Hopkins University to Washington DC, with its prominent new building, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, located at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, provides an ideal geographic positioning for impact through federal health policy.