The University of Houston (UH) has launched a new university-wide initiative that brings together research, data and interdisciplinary expertise to help its city address homelessness.
The university’s new Institute for Housing, Homelessness and Health (IH3) is part of its UH Health effort, a cross-disciplinary academic health enterprise focused on improving health in Texas. IH3 will work alongside community orgs, hospitals, local government and housing providers to help the group scale successful approaches.
“Housing and health are intricately related,” Ben King, Ph.D., founding director of IH3, told Fierce Healthcare in an advanced interview. King is also a clinical associate professor at UH’s Tillman Family College of Medicine. “Homelessness is a massively complex issue that doesn’t get solved with simple solutions and platitudes, so the solutions are going to be as varied and complex as what gets covered by a university.”
Housing affordability, education costs and the economy are all drivers of homelessness, King explained. Houston has invested significantly in housing interventions, achieving one of the lowest homelessness rates per capita in the country. “There’s a lot that is going well, in a sense, with the way that the system is operating in Houston,” King said.
IH3 will unite faculty, researchers and students from across schools, including medicine, nursing, social work, law, business, engineering and others. The goal is to help inform leaders of trends, identify service gaps and make more informed decisions. This will also help community organizations demonstrate impact and outcomes when they seek funding.
“We don’t want to do something that is not a university role,” King stressed. “The goal is never to be competitive with the system. It’s to support the system.”
UH is Houston’s largest public research university and a Carnegie-designated Tier One institution, meaning it has high research activity. While research is not IH3’s first priority, there will be opportunities to evaluate tools.
Healthcare has historically been bad at bringing together disparate data for a clearer picture of interventions and outcomes, King, a clinical epidemiologist by background, explained. This has also been the case in the local homeless response system. To do this, IH3 will have a data lab helping model new policies and programs before they are implemented.
“Systems intelligence requires information to be used and then fed back to the system in order to create continuous quality improvement,” he said.