Ariana Nexus designs and runs community health needs assessments, patient experience studies and community-based research with Afghan communities across the United States. Researchers are matched to each participant’s language, dialect and gender, and every step, from survey translation to the final report, is done by our own team.
For nonprofit hospitals, health departments, community health centers, universities and health plans that need Afghan patients’ needs recorded in their own words, and documented to the standard their reviewers expect.
A community health needs assessment is a study of a community’s health needs, built from public data and direct input from residents, that a health organization uses to set priorities. Nonprofit hospitals must complete one every three years under Internal Revenue Code Section 501(r)(3), and adopt an implementation strategy for the needs it identifies.
IRS rules require input from members of medically underserved, low-income and minority populations, and they count people with limited English proficiency as medically underserved. In many service areas, that includes Afghan patients who speak Pashto or Dari.
Patient research goes one step further: interviews, focus groups and surveys about how people experience care, used to fix access, communication and follow-up.
Five layers, each owned by one part of the firm, with the same governance running through all of them.
Most assessments rely on data and survey methods that were never built to find Afghan residents.
Each organization answers to a different reviewer. The work is shaped to that requirement.
Commission a full Afghan-community assessment, or only the parts your current study is missing.
Six stages, set to your assessment cycle and review deadlines.
Answers change with who is asking. We set the match before fieldwork instead of improvising it.
We do not send bilingual volunteers or untrained interpreters into research.
Twenty-four languages in five families, following the Ariana 24-Language Atlas. Most interviews run in Pashto and Dari; the smaller languages are staffed by arrangement and planned into your timeline.
The program is overseen by Hassan Ukasha, Managing Partner, and delivered by partners and managers who trained in public health, psychology, engineering and computer science at Cornell, Brown, the University of Chicago and the University of British Columbia. The researchers they lead speak each participant’s language and dialect and know these communities from the inside.
Oversees the firm’s operations and the Afghan community health research program, including engagement governance, research ethics, participant safety and data protection. Grew up in Herat.
No national certification exam tests medical interpreting in Pashto or Dari. The U.S. healthcare interpreter certifications test bilingual skills in only a handful of languages and assess every other language in English alone. So Ariana Nexus sets the standard: our researchers and interpreters are trained and assessed against our written standard before they work with a participant, and we also train Afghan diaspora interpreters beyond our own team.
No standard list of Afghan residents exists to sample from, and most forms have no Afghan option. We build the path to the community for each assessment, and document every step so your reviewers can follow it.
Add an Afghan-community module to your CHNA: a survey, focus groups and key informant interviews in Pashto and Dari, run by gender-matched researchers, with a consultation record your report can cite. We fit the module to your cycle and to the framework your current consultant uses.
Yes. Women’s groups are moderated by women researchers in the participants’ own language and dialect, at times and places the women choose. Men are present only if participants want them there.
No. Dari and Iranian Persian (Farsi) share a written base but differ in vocabulary, health terms and forms of address. A Farsi questionnaire can read as foreign to Afghan respondents and change what they think a question means, so we translate into Afghan Dari and test it with Afghan speakers.
Through Afghan community organizations, faith and community leaders, resettlement networks, clinics and referral chains, with eligibility screening in the participant’s language. We report recruitment by channel so your IRB and your readers can see how the sample was built.
Interview guides are trauma-informed and reviewed by a clinically trained psychologist. Participants decide what they share, researchers follow a distress protocol, and support and referral are always available. Moral injury, sometimes called moral trauma, is explored only when a study needs it, and we never diagnose or treat.
Not unless a study cannot answer its question without it. Participants are told what we collect, why and who will see it before they agree, and data is de-identified before analysis.
Yes. We prepare protocol sections, recruitment scripts and Pashto and Dari consent materials, and we answer IRB questions about translation, consent and participant safety.
Yes. Our team translates your community survey into Pashto and Dari, tests it in cognitive interviews with Afghan respondents and documents every decision for your methods section. Patient-reported outcome and screening instruments that need formal linguistic validation are handled by our separate linguistic validation service.
It depends on your cycle, geography, sample and review approvals. We set the schedule at scoping so the Afghan findings arrive before your report and implementation strategy are due.
Interpreters carry what is said. Research also needs someone who can design questions, probe, notice what is left unsaid and keep consistent records. Our researchers do both, in the participant’s language.
Afghan patients and families across the United States, part of the wider Afghan diaspora: recent evacuees, Special Immigrant Visa holders, refugees and long-settled families, including the large communities in the Washington, D.C. region, California and Texas.
A findings report ready for your CHNA or community health assessment, a methods and consultation record, tested instruments, de-identified data with a codebook, community-ranked priorities and a plain-language summary in Pashto and Dari.
Tell us your cycle, service area and questions. Scoping conversations are confidential, and we sign your NDA on request.
