Overview

Health care has often taken a one-size-fits-all approach. But people are different, and health is shaped by many factors, such as lifestyle, environment, and genetics, that are not always considered together in care. When this full picture is missing, treatments may be less effective. The costs of this imprecision are felt across the health system:

• For patients, one-size-fits-all means trial and error: repeated visits to find the right medication, the right dose, and the right duration of treatment.
• For providers, fragmented records and small studies make it difficult to coordinate care across specialists or to recommend treatments with confidence.
• For researchers, recruiting participants, collecting data, and building new databases for every study is costly and slow, and critical data may be siloed in ways that limit discovery.

The All of Us Research Program is changing that. Rather than focusing on a single disease or population, All of Us has built one of the largest and most comprehensive health databases in history. The goal: give researchers the data they need to understand how individual differences in lifestyle, environment, and genetics influence health, so that prevention and treatment can become more precise and more personal.

Authorized by the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016, All of Us is an ambitious, long-term effort hosted by the National Institutes of Health. The program invites people from all backgrounds across the United States to contribute to research that could benefit everyone.

What Makes Us Different

Breadth. With a goal of enrolling one million or more participants across the United States, All of Us is building one of the largest health databases of its kind. As the dataset grows, patterns emerge that are not visible at a smaller scale.

Scale. The program includes people from across the country, across regions, ages, and health experiences. This broad participation helps researchers study health and disease in ways that better reflect real-world populations.

Depth. All of Us collects many types of data: surveys, electronic health records, blood and other samples, and environmental data. Over time, participants may also share data from wearable devices and other technologies. This helps create a more complete picture of what affects health.

Duration. The program will go on for decades. Long-term participation lets researchers study how health and disease change over time.

Innovation. All of Us brings together participants, researchers, health care providers, and technology experts to build a new model for how large-scale research is conducted. Lessons from the program are shared with research communities around the world.

Access. The program makes its data available to a wide range of researchers, from university professors to citizen scientists, through the Researcher Workbench. Robust security and privacy protections keep participants' personal information safe.

Core Values

The All of Us Research Program is guided by a set of core values:

• Participation is open to all. People of all backgrounds are welcome. You can be healthy or experience health issues. You can sign up directly through JoinAllofUs.org or through participating health care provider organizations.
• Participants reflect the rich diversity of the United States. To develop individualized plans for disease prevention and treatment, researchers need data that captures the differences that make each of us unique. A diverse participant group leads to speed up health research that helps make health care better for everyone.
• Participants are partners. Participants shape the program with their input and contribute to a project that may improve the health of future generations. They may also learn about their own health.
• Transparency earns trust. We inform participants about how their data are used, accessed, and shared. Participants can choose how much information to share.
• Participants have access to their information. All of Us lets participants see their own information and records.
• Data are broadly accessible for research purposes. All of Us makes information about participants as a group available in a public database. Everyone can explore the database or use it to make discoveries. Data from individual participants are also available, but only for researchers who apply and are approved. Any personal information that identifies a participant, such as name or address, is removed from data that researchers can access.
• Security and privacy are of highest importance. Data are stored in a secure, cloud-based database. All systems meet the requirements of the Federal Information Security Management Act. Ongoing security tests help protect participant data. Learn more about how the All of Us Research Program protects data and privacy.
• The program will be a catalyst for positive change in research. Working together, All of Us researchers, partners, and participants can build a better future for health research and care.

Find in-depth information about how the program works in the All of Us Research Program Protocol.

Strategic Goals

Since its founding, All of Us has been guided by its core values and an ambitious mission. The program has defined six strategic goals to chart its path forward.

1. Enrollment and Retention
   Enroll one million participants who reflect the diversity of the United States and cover the full lifespan, with at least 500,000 contributing to ongoing data collection. The program prioritizes building long-term relationships with participants, especially those from communities historically underrepresented in biomedical research.
2. Data and Specimen Collection
   Expand the dataset to include surveys, health data streams, whole genome sequences, environmental data, and physical measures for one million participants. The program prioritizes data that enables impactful discoveries and helps reduce health disparities.
3. Partnered Research Studies
   Launch partnered research studies as a scalable capability that expands the cohort and delivers new data types. These independent studies leverage All of Us infrastructure to accelerate health research more efficiently than any single program could achieve alone.
4. Researcher Access and Impact
   Build a diverse global community of at least 10,000 researchers using All of Us data through the Researcher Workbench. The program is expanding access across all sectors and adding tools to increase platform utility and data interoperability with international cohorts.
5. Participant Return of Value
   Integrate return of value into program activities and assess its impact. This includes providing participants with meaningful information related to their health and participation, and evaluating how these efforts support engagement, understanding, and long-term involvement. This goal reinforces the program's core value that participants are partners.
6. Management and Operations
   Enable the full potential of the program through organizational accountability, data-driven decision-making, effective processes, and team development. The program's people, processes, systems, data, and analytics will evolve to accommodate growth in the most effective and resource-efficient manner. How the program operates will be clear and understood by everyone connected to All of Us.

Funding

All of Us is funded through federal appropriations from Congress. Authorized under the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016, the program has been supported by Cures Act funding and additional base appropriations to the NIH Office of the Director.

Learn more about All of Us funding and current budget details.