Breaking Data Barriers and Scaling Behavior Change Interventions to Benefit Older Adult Health through Public-Private Partnerships

On April 29-30, 2021, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Behavioral and Social Research (BSR) Division convened an expert panel to discuss strategies for Breaking Data Barriers and Scaling Behavior Change Interventions to Benefit Older Adult Health through Public-Private Partnerships. The 22 invited presenters and discussants provided insight into opportunities to expand data access and integration through public–private partnerships. In addition, the panelists discussed leveraging big data assets to support the implementation of evidence-based behavioral interventions and to address health disparities in older adults, including individuals living with dementia. The panelists emphasized that richer, more complete datasets are needed to understand health disparities, particularly for older adults, including the impact of social determinants of health (SDOH) on individual health outcomes and of community-level determinants on health care policy. The infrastructure to build new datasets and support data-driven research is costly and time-consuming to maintain, and adequate sustained resourcing is required to provide broad access to richer data at a lower cost. Public–private partnerships can address the resourcing needs for data access and integration, as well as more complex issues, including social license and governance for the use of big data and can ensure the capacity for data for future usability.

The meeting summary (PDF, 627K) is available.