More than Medicine’s Health Solutions Science in Action Funding Opportunity

Sponsor: Pathways for Health Research Collective
Internal Deadline: 11/06/2026
Institutional Submission Limit: 1
Sponsor Deadline: 11/18/2026
Program Website

As part of its “More than Medicine” campaign to demonstrate that health solutions science is rigorous and essential to realize improved health outcomes in the United States, the Pathways for Health Research Collective is bringing together funders to join in this one-time funding opportunity to demonstrate the real-world impact of health solutions science and strengthen a national case for a sustainable enterprise.

 

Eligible Approaches

This opportunity seeks to support projects that:

 

• Apply evidence-based health solutions science in the United States at greater-than-pilot scale and rigorously measure health impact.


• Are ready to achieve a meaningful, measurable improvement in health outcomes—or near-term validated proxy outcomes linked to long-term health impact.


• Address a significant source of morbidity and mortality.


• Build from an existing, sufficiently powered evidence base rather than testing a new idea for the first time.


• Bring together knowledge producers and knowledge users to implement, evaluate, and sustain the work.


• Have a feasible three-year plan, with clear milestones and endpoints.


• Leverage financial and nonfinancial commitments from relevant partners.


• Generate learning that can inform replication in other settings, populations, or at greater scale.


• Demonstrate the potential for health solutions science to advance policy, practice, or process innovation.

 

Activities That Are Out of Scope

The Collective aims to support projects with high potential to produce real-world, measurable impact on health outcomes within a defined time period. Therefore, the following are not eligible as the primary purpose of a proposal:

 

• Pilot projects intended to build evidence for a new intervention.


• Centers of excellence.


• Strictly research studies to discover new knowledge, including observational studies or secondary analyses intended only to document drivers of health or disease in a community.


• Projects seeking to establish the scale needed for a power assessment.


• Any work involving non-human animals.


• New or repurposed drug clinical trials.


• Projects to design, develop, or commercialize new medical devices, including prototypes and hardware-based diagnostics or therapeutics.


• Projects that rely solely on individual behavior change, such as health education programs, without addressing broader systems, conditions, incentives, environments, or structural factors.

 

Additional information may be found in the Request for Applications.

 

Eligibility and USC Submission Limit

 

Pathways for Health Research Collective permits schools, departments, centers, institutes, and programs within the same university to submit separate applications, provided each proposal is distinct. To coordinate USC’s submissions, avoid duplication, and ensure compliance with the sponsor’s limits, each USC school, department, center, institute, or program may advance no more than one application through this internal process

 

All USC-led applications must be coordinated through this internal process before submission to Pathways for Health Research Collective.

Submission Process

Submission Process

Faculty and staff interested in this opportunity should submit the following materials as a single PDF to Corporate and Foundation Relations at USCCFR@sc.edu by 5:00 p.m. on November 6, 2026:

 

Because there is such a short turnaround time, these are the actual pre-proposal questions. This allows us to review for fit and readiness, and proposals asked to advance can focus on targeted revisions.

 

• Project information: Project title; USC project lead’s name, title, unit, and contact information; sponsoring USC school, department, center, institute, or program; name of collaborating organization(s)
• Project descriptors: Project start date, total project cost, grant request, grant purpose in one sentence; type of driver of health or disease to be addressed (i.e., behavioral, clinical, social, economic, environmental, or other).
• Health impact and strength of underlying evidence:

1. Problem—max 150 words: identify the knowledge user(s) involved in this project. Describe the problem(s) they are seeking to address, how they have been involved in developing the proposed project, and how they will be engaged to support successful implementation and longer-term sustainability.
2. Solution—max 150 words: describe the proposed evidence being implemented. Include the basis of evidence for its potential effectiveness and how it would lead to systems-level change to address relevant drivers of health.
3. Solution relevance—max 150 words: indicate if and how the scientific evidence for the solution was produced together with knowledge user participation to improve real-world health outcomes or proxies that reflect their real-world needs and priorities.
4. Measuring health impact—max 150 words: describe the health outcome(s), or relevant and meaningful proxy or proxies, that the project would seek to improve. State the outcome’s or proxy’s relationship to disease burden, quality of life-years or life expectancy. If the ultimate health outcome requires a longer time horizon for measurable improvement, describe evidence-based interim indicators that would be measured. Indicate if the outcome or proxy that would be measured is already aligned with national or state health goals or metrics or would be new.
5. Population of interest—max 1 sentence: specifically indicate the population, and its size, in which the intervention or knowledge implementation would be applied.
6. Geographic focus: identify the geographic region(s) relevant to the project, if applicable.
7. Change sought—max 150 words: state the threshold-level change in health outcome or proxy that the knowledge implementation would seek to achieve in a “from-to” format (baseline to desired outcome) with supporting evidence. For example, a reduction of mortality in a given geographic area from X to Y per 100,000 people within three years.
8. Why now?—max 150 words: describe current tailwinds for the project, which are external conditions favoring the success of the project. Explicitly describe what have been barriers that have prevented the implementation of the evidence in question and why these can be overcome at this moment.
9. Possible risks—max 150 words: describe current headwinds for the project, which are challenges to the success of the project.
10. Replicability—max 150 words: describe how the results of the project, if successful, would enable application in other settings, populations, or greater scale.

• Engagement and alignment:

1. Milestones—max 150 words OR a concise set of bullet points: include a high-level overview of milestones or phases in the project that mark timepoints and key considerations for go/no go decisions regarding implementation and outcome measurement.
2. Organizations involved—max 150 words: describe the role of organizations involved in the project team and role(s), if any, of leadership of the organizations involved in the project team.
3. Organizational leadership—max 150 words: describe how the project would be coordinated across collaborating organizations, who would lead each collaborating team day-to-day, and what authority they would have across partner organizations.
4. Knowledge user involvement—max 150 words: describe the nature of involvement, if any, of knowledge users in the project.

• Leverage: Leverage is defined as monetary (e.g., infrastructure, technology, personnel effort, etc.) and non-monetary (e.g. leadership, networks, influence, trust, etc.) commitments and contributions from relevant local, state, regional, or national stakeholders (e.g., from community or health conversion foundations, local governments, health systems, payers, companies or other partners) necessary to execute the plan, to complement this funding opportunity, and to potentially sustain impact beyond the project funding, if successful.

1. Max 150 words: For each leverage category, describe the nature of the leverage, articulate its status (confirmed or pending), identify the relevant contributing organization, and briefly describe if this is a new or longstanding partnership/collaboration.

 

• The LOI requires a 7-minute project description video—for this internal submission, please include an overview (bullet points will suffice) of info to be covered or slides used.

 

For questions regarding this opportunity or the internal selection process, please contact Chris Segars, Corporate and Foundation Relations, at chris.segars@sc.edu.