IHME’s 2024 Roux Prize awarded to Community Health Impact Coalition CEO – recognized for contributions to improve population health

(Press-News.org) On behalf of the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC), Dr. Madeleine Ballard, global health leader and CEO of CHIC, is the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s 2024 Roux Prize winner. The award recognizes Dr. Ballard’s work alongside thousands of community health workers (CHWs) to secure quality care for all, through evidence-based health systems benefiting millions of people across the world. 

Half of the world's population lacks access to essential health services. Around the globe, CHWs have stepped up to address this critical gap and deliver care in a way that improves access, increases equity, and saves lives. Despite their vital work, many CHWs remain unsalaried, unsupervised, and unequipped, so they are not set up to succeed in global health goals. Co-founded by Dr. Ballard in 2019, CHIC has played a key role in influencing guidelines, increasing funding, and advancing the development of national policies needed to make professional CHWs the norm everywhere.  

“Millions of community health workers play a critical role in regions where resources are scarce and where marginalized populations face significant barriers to care,” said Dr. Chris Murray, Director of IHME. “The Roux Prize seeks to recognize global health leaders like Dr. Ballard and organizations such as CHIC who drive innovation, ambition, and collaboration. Through meticulous research, advocacy, and activation work, CHIC is addressing health disparities and improving access to health care,” he added. Amidst a worsening shortage of health workers, major health institutions are aiming to expand their workforce by 2030. By building a multi-country coalition of CHWs, advocates, and researchers, Dr. Ballard has brought key stakeholders together to address critical health, data, and implementation challenges that no one organization could solve alone.  

This collaborative effort has resulted in significant achievements, including the first-ever WHO guideline on CHWs, USAID’s flagship CHW program evaluation tool, and the first-ever guidance on creating national georeferenced community health worker master lists.  

The impact of this work does not end at global guidelines. The Coalition also leverages evidence to win commitments from major development aid providers and policymakers. 

“Community health workers are the backbone of our health systems, yet their critical contributions are systemically overlooked,” Dr. Ballard said. “Years of rigorous research have shown that CHWs are essential to improving health outcomes, lowering costs, and increasing equity. But only if they’re treated like professionals – with salaries, skills, supervision, and supplies. We must translate this research into action – our work is about setting up CHWs for success in providing quality care for all, including those who provide it,” she added. 

Now in its 11th year, the Roux Prize has been recognizing individuals all over the globe who have leveraged evidence-based health data to improve population health. The Roux Prize is awarded by the IHME at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine. 

Dr. Ballard has been a strong advocate for using routine data collected during programmatic care delivery in research, and she sees many parallels between the Global Burden of Disease study as a hub for informing global health initiatives and CHIC’s own proCHW Policy Dashboard, a scoreboard for the proCHW movement. 

“The Roux Prize will help advance our collaborative research and CHIC’s use of evidence to influence guidelines, funding, and policy to improve population health in multiple countries around the world,” Dr. Ballard stated. “This recognition is transformative for the Coalition as it will help expand our work creating proCHW guidelines, increasing funding, and ultimately impacting the millions of CHWs and patients we serve,” she concluded.  

Dr. Ballard is a Rhodes Scholar, recipient of the Harvard Women’s Leadership Award, and co-chair of the Anti-Racism Task Force at the Arnhold Institute for Global Health of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she is on faculty. 

As the Roux Prize winner, Dr. Ballard will receive $100,000 that will be used to advance CHIC’s work on establishing professional CHW policies in 95 countries. CHIC and Dr. Ballard will be recognized at an award ceremony on October 15 in London. 

 

IHME will begin accepting nominations for the 2025 Roux Prize on December 2, 2024. Nominations are accepted from all countries and can include, but are not limited to, staff in government agencies, leaders in charitable organizations, or community health providers. 

For questions about the prize, contact info@rouxprize.org 

For media interviews, contact ihmemedia@uw.edu 

 

About the Roux Prize 

The Roux Prize is sponsored by IHME’s founding board member David Roux and his wife, Barbara, to reward innovation in the application of disease burden research. The prize recognizes the person who has used health evidence in bold ways to make people healthier – and to highlight just what’s possible when visionaries use health evidence to change lives. 

About IHME 

An independent population health research organization based at the University of Washington School of Medicine, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) works with collaborators around the world to develop timely, relevant, and scientifically valid evidence that illuminates the state of health everywhere. In making our research available and approachable, we aim to inform health policy and practice in pursuit of our vision: all people living long lives in full health.    

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