LINCOLN, Neb.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb 11, 2025--
NRC Health is proud to partner with UC Health, a relationship designed to support the evolving needs of the patients, consumers, and broader communities UC Health serves.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250211543226/en/
UC Health will leverage NRC Health’s innovative and trusted Market Insights and Community Insights solutions to truly understand the unique needs, behaviors, and preferences of consumers in today’s complex healthcare landscape.
UC Health is a nationally recognized academic health system serving Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. The health system is dedicated to advancing medicine and improving the health of all people by fostering groundbreaking medical research and education. The health system’s expert teams combine cutting-edge research with compassionate care, offering patients advanced treatment options for complex medical conditions.
“UC Health is an esteemed organization that shares our vision of building greater Human Understanding across the healthcare journey,” said Helen Hrdy, Chief Operating Officer at NRC Health. “Our solutions bring unrivaled market intelligence to the heart of every business decision. We are eager to see UC Health leverage these insights to further its mission.”
NRC Health’s Market Experience and Consumer Experience solutions are designed to equip healthcare organizations like UC Health with comprehensive data to inform business decisions, build long-term loyalty, and foster trust among healthcare consumers.
Market Insights
Market Insights harnesses the power of more than 300,000 consumer voices annually to measure, track, and assess what matters using over 200 unique metrics in hundreds of U.S. markets. Used by leading hospitals and health systems across the country, Market Insights provides access to the richest syndicated data collection in the healthcare industry, a proprietary report-generating interface, and the opportunity for tailored research solutions to help answer specific business questions.
Community Insights
Community Insights delivers actionable insights to inform pressing healthcare business challenges and identify consumer behaviors, needs, expectations, and experiences. NRC Health has supported more than 200 diverse health systems in getting the insights and voices they need to support a variety of strategic and operational business challenges facing healthcare leaders.
About NRC Health
NRC Health has received the 2025 Best in KLAS Award for Healthcare Experience Management. This recognition independently validates NRC Health’s relentless pursuit of excellence in healthcare through innovation and deep partnerships, bringing together its comprehensive experience management platform, advanced technology, and proven techniques to drive the most human healthcare experiences.
For more than 40 years, NRC Health (NASDAQ: NRC) has led the charge to humanize healthcare and support organizations in their understanding of each unique individual. NRC Health’s commitment to Human Understanding helps leading healthcare systems get to know the patients, consumers, employees, and communities they serve on a human level. Guided by its uniquely empathic heritage, human-centered approach, unmatched market research, and emphasis on consumer preferences, NRC Health is transforming the healthcare experience, creating strong outcomes across the healthcare journey. For more information, email info@nrchealth.com or visit www.nrchealth.com.
NRC Health is proud to partner with UC Health, a relationship designed to support the evolving needs of the patients, consumers, and broader communities UC Health serves. UC Health will leverage NRC Health’s innovative and trusted Market Insights and Community Insights solutions to truly understand the unique needs, behaviors, and preferences of consumers in today’s complex healthcare landscape. (Photo: Business Wire)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
