Federal policy battles over how — or whether — race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation should be tracked in public health data raised alarms among researchers who warned that what isn’t measured can’t be fixed. At the same time, climate-driven disasters, infectious disease outbreaks, and ongoing Medicaid churn exposed the unevenness of preparedness and access across communities.
Here are my predictions for topics poised to dominate the news cycle in 2026. These issues reflect the shifting political landscape, technological upheavals and persistent structural disparities. Covering them in depth and context will help audiences connect systemic drivers to lived experience.
Equity and artificial intelligence in medicine. As health systems increasingly adopt AI for clinical decision-making, billing, and administrative tasks, civil rights advocates are warning that poorly designed algorithms could deepen existing disparities rather than reduce them. In late 2025, the NAACP released a 75-page report calling for “equity-first” standards in health AI, including bias audits, transparency reports, and community governance councils, precisely because models trained without diverse representation risk perpetuating racial health disparities.
This push for anti-biased AI is spotlighted as hospitals, payers, and tech developers work to embed fairness into tools that could affect diagnostic and treatment decisions for millions. The ethics and regulation of AI — once a niche policy beat — is now a core equity story with real implications for maternal mortality, chronic disease management and insurance access.
Impact of federal policy changes on health equity infrastructure. Shifts in federal policy — such as executive orders affecting how race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation are discussed in public health data — have alarmed experts for their potential to erase critical metrics used to track disparities. Efforts to remove DEI language from public health agency outputs have drawn sustained criticism for hindering researchers’ ability to measure and address inequities. Journalists will need to connect policy debates in Washington with outcomes in local communities, showing how data suppression or reclassification can obscure suffering and slow targeted intervention.
Crisis of health data equity and representation. Data is the currency of modern public health — but if it skews toward well-represented groups, inequities get baked into everything including resource allocation and policy design. Recent public health scholarship calls for frameworks that foreground “data equity” to ensure inclusive data collection, representative sampling, and bias-aware analytics and prevent misinformed decisions that could exacerbate disparities. As new technologies like genomics, telemedicine, and personalized medicine expand, journalists should interrogate who is being counted — and who isn’t — in the datasets driving innovation.
Access inequities in safety-net and community-based care. With Medicaid funding facing cuts and rural hospitals already under financial strain, safety net providers such as federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) will be under scrutiny. Regulatory enforcement of executive orders affecting FQHCs signals increased oversight but also highlights the strain these critical providers face amid political and fiscal uncertainty. Reporting will need to explain how changes in funding, regulation, and reimbursement models affect front-line access for populations with the least resources.
Equitable epidemic and emergency preparedness will be a theme as the world recovers from COVID-19 and braces for future infectious threats. Equity-focused frameworks in global public health research call for action-oriented approaches to epidemic response that deliberately address structural disparities in response capacity and outcomes. Journalists will be tasked with translating these frameworks into assessments of how public health agencies plan for, communicate about, and execute emergency responses in ways that protect vulnerable communities, including rural populations with limited care access and urban neighborhoods with high baseline chronic disease burdens.
Here are a few especially useful resources for finding data, expert sources, accountability angles and community-level context:
KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) Health Equity & Policy Analysis: KFF issues briefs, polling, and explainers are especially useful for translating complex policy changes into equity impacts at the local level. KFF data products are widely cited and updated frequently, making them strong grounding sources for both breaking news and enterprise reporting.
CDC’s Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and PLACES Data: Despite political debates over data collection, the CDC continues to publish neighborhood-level data on health outcomes, chronic disease prevalence and social risk factors through tools like PLACES. These datasets allow journalists to show geographic inequities within states and cities and to connect policy decisions to measurable outcomes. They can also help with reporting on rural health, chronic disease disparities, and emergency preparedness gaps.
Urban Institute Health Policy Center: The Urban Institute produces rigorous research on how federal and state policies affect low-income populations, communities of color, immigrants and people with disabilities. Its work on Medicaid churn, safety-net financing, housing and health, and data equity is especially relevant as journalists track the downstream effects of policy changes in 2026. Urban’s experts are also frequently available for interviews and explanatory background.
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) – Health Equity and AI Initiatives: As artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in health care, NAM’s work on algorithmic bias, governance, and equity offers journalists an authoritative entry point into a technically complex topic. NAM convenings, consensus reports, and expert panels can help reporters scrutinize claims made by health systems and tech companies while grounding coverage in ethical and evidence-based frameworks.
Equity-focused academic journals and translational hubs journals:Health Equity, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, and International Journal for Equity in Health, among others, publish research with direct policy and practice implications. Pairing these studies with interviews from community organizations and clinicians can help journalists contextualize research. Many articles also highlight gaps in data or implementation that can be catalysts for investigative reporting.
