Improving population health requires more than identifying effective interventions or establishing relationships among researchers, organizations, and communities. It requires durable infrastructure that enables people and institutions to work together, coordinate their efforts, translate knowledge into action, and sustain progress over time. The 2027 IAPHS Annual Meeting will explore this next frontier through the theme Building What Matters: Partnership Infrastructure for Population Health Impact.
The theme builds upon important conversations within IAPHS and the broader population health community about engagement and trust. These remain essential foundations for effective population health research and action. The 2027 meeting will extend these conversations by asking what is necessary to move from engagement and trust to durable partnerships capable of producing sustained impact. The foundational premise is that partnership infrastructure provides the foundation for translating engagement and trust into partnerships, partnerships into coordinated action, and coordinated action into sustained population health impact.
Partnership infrastructure encompasses the structures, capabilities, resources, and relationships that allow individuals and organizations to work effectively across institutional and sectoral boundaries. This infrastructure can include governance and decision-making structures; a prepared and adaptable workforce; data and technology systems; sustainable financing and resource models; mechanisms for communication, implementation, and evaluation; and enduring relationships among organizations and the communities they serve. Rather than viewing these elements as supporting activities, the 2027 meeting will consider them as essential components of the science and practice of achieving population health impact.
The meeting will provide opportunities to examine partnership infrastructure across multiple sectors, including academic and research institutions, health systems and industry, public health and policy organizations, philanthropic organizations, and community- and faith-based organizations. Attention will be given to how these sectors can align their capabilities while maintaining their distinct roles and responsibilities. Data, technology, and emerging tools such as artificial intelligence will be considered as cross-cutting resources that can strengthen connection, coordination, learning, and implementation across partnerships.
The theme also creates space to examine the people and processes that make partnership infrastructure work. Workforce development, team and partnership science, implementation, governance, financing, evaluation, and sustainability are therefore central to the conversation. The meeting will invite participants to consider not only what works, but also what must be built, strengthened, connected, and sustained for what works to have lasting population health impact.
Ultimately, *Building What Matters* is an invitation to move beyond episodic collaborations toward the development of durable systems for population health action. The 2027 IAPHS Annual Meeting will bring together researchers, practitioners, community partners, health system leaders, policymakers, philanthropic organizations, and other stakeholders to examine what partnership infrastructure looks like, how it can be studied and strengthened, and how it can support coordinated action across settings and over time.
The aspiration is for IAPHS 2027 to advance a field-wide conversation about the infrastructure needed to turn relationships into partnerships, partnerships into action, and action into sustained population health impact.
