# Hats & Ladders for Health: Data-driven Decision-Making for Future Health Citizens and Professionals

> **NIH NIH R44** · HATS & LADDERS, INC. · 2024 · $919,199

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Despite a growing demand for health care workers and evidence that a diverse health workforce is vital for
public wellbeing, most young people lack awareness of health career options and how to pursue them. Narrow
career exposure, insufficient advising, lack of encouragement to pursue STEM subjects, and lack of concordant
mentors are significant barriers for Black and Latino/x youth—two groups consistently under-represented
across health professions. This project will help these adolescents to overcome barriers and develop positive
health identities so they are more confident in their ability to undertake challenging health career pathways and
to make informed health decisions. To do so, a joint team from Hats & Ladders, Inc., Mentoring in Medicine,
the University of Texas at Austin School of Human Ecology, CareerVillage and Applied Curiosity Research will
design, develop, and test Hats & Ladders for Health: Data-driven Decision-Making for Future Health Citizens
and Professionals (HLH). This blended digital experience targets 9th- and 10th-grade students and educators in
general career and health education programs, and will consist of a digital gamified app, project-based
activities, live health career panels, near-peer mentoring sessions, and a robust instructional toolkit with training
videos, progress reports, lessons and other educator supports for providing accurate, actionable student
feedback. The overall outcomes of HLH’s data-driven, inquiry-based, and inclusive intervention could have
broad reaching public health impact, and are to (1) increase students’ confidence in their ability to pursue
challenging health career pathways and solve problems along the way; (2) increase their ability to find,
understand, and use information to make health-related decisions; and, (3) develop educators’ capacity to
provide quality health career guidance and health literacy instruction. Designed to strengthen our organization’s
impact on high school youth, our intervention will bring a novel set of interactions––as requested by our
existing users––and use them to deepen inquiry-based learning related to health careers and literacy during the
critical stage of early high school.
In Phase I, the H&L R&D team will collect, analyze and input data from concordant healthcare professionals
into a new health career database that we will integrate into the HLH app. To gather the data, we will develop,
and test for relevance, an online survey targeting 500 racially and professionally diverse respondents through
CareerVillage’s community of 3,000 health professionals (52% BIPOC) and 1,500+ Mentoring in Medicine
volunteers. A subset of 25-30 survey respondents will participate in video interviews. Survey data and video
snippets will be tagged with metadata and inputted into the database enabling us to recommend authentic and
relevant health content to students with shared demographic and career attributes. We will test usability and
feasibility of a...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10918811
- **Project number:** 4R44GM150311-02
- **Recipient organization:** HATS & LADDERS, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Sonia K Gonzalez
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $919,199
- **Award type:** 4N
- **Project period:** 2023-09-01 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10918811

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10918811, Hats & Ladders for Health: Data-driven Decision-Making for Future Health Citizens and Professionals (4R44GM150311-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10918811. Licensed CC0.

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