June 20, 2026
NEWPORT, R.I. — What if the key to improving America’s health isn’t just medical—but cultural, sociological, and deeply human? On June 18, the Pell Center and Nationhood Lab hosted a group of health reform thinkers and practioners from across the country for a confab and public presentation on the Salve Regina University campus in Newport, Rhode Island.
The conference, “Reimagining American Health: Culture, Systems, and the Future of Care,” brought together the core members of an ad hoc research collaborative: Nicolaas Pronk, president and CEO of the HealthPartners Institute in Minneapolis, Ross Arena of the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Applied Health Sciences, Robin Blackstone, a surgeon and health reform engineer who heads Blackstone Health, and Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard, whose American Nations model forms the backbone of the geographical and large-scale cultural aspects group’s research.
For the past three years, Pronk, Arena and Woodard and a shifting cast of experts from across the the country have been collaborating to better document and understand health outcome disparities across the United State’s regional cultures and have built a model to analyze the cultural determinants of health at the U.S. county-level. To date, this group has published 40 peer-reviewed research articles in 18 journals, including The Lancet Regional Health Americas, The British Journal of Sports Medicine, Obesity, and Nature‘s Scientific Reports. Blackstone, whose focus is on how to apply solutions the research has revealed, has recently joined the collaborative.
At the public meeting before a near-capacity crowd at the Pell Center ballroom, the researchers connectefd the dots between regional culture, public policy, and individual care to reimagine how health actually works in the United States. The shared the centuries-old cultural divides shape today’s outcomes, showed their mapping of health as a complex adaptive system, and introduced Blackstone’s bold new “Trajectory Engineering” framework that could transform care at both the bedside and the population level.
Nationhood Lab, based at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, is an interdisciplinary research, writing, testing and dissemination project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation’s stability. The project delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.