Design of a Reproducible Healthy Aging Policy Observatory: Infrastructure for Trustworthy Aging-Policy Evidence in Canada
The evidence base for aging policy suffers less from a shortage of analysis than from a shortage of trustworthy infrastructure. We argue these are infrastructure problems, not analysis problems, and present the design of a reproducible observatory organized around the Healthy Aging Policy Intelligence Cycle — a policy-level Learning Health System. Evaluated as a design, the instrument is traceable (every published value resolves to its source), reproducible (deterministic, idempotent), grounded (no fabricated AI citation is representable), and honest about robustness (index levels move at most 2.3 points across weightings, and a ranking the weighting can reverse is reported as a tie). The design itself is the contribution.
Figure 1 — the Policy Intelligence Cycle