Health outcomes remain one of the starkest indicators of inequality, both between and within countries. HDRI's Global Health team studies the policy structures that determine who has access to quality care, and who is left behind, examining health systems not as isolated technical arrangements, but as products of political choices with direct human consequences.

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Our research spans the governance of public health emergencies, the durability of health systems under economic and political stress, and the social determinants that shape health outcomes long before a patient ever reaches a clinic. We give particular attention to how health policy intersects with our other thematic areas, how climate change reshapes disease burden, how migration affects access to care, and how gender shapes health outcomes, because health policy divorced from its social context is incomplete policy.