Tour Health Research Initiative

The problem

Touring crews and artists live in a blind spot — distributed across the world, off the grid for months, outside every normal health system. The strain on them was real but undocumented, and anecdote doesn’t move policy, fund a service, or convince a skeptic. Someone had to turn a known problem into defensible evidence. And getting a transient, hard-to-survey population to respond at all is its own design problem.

The work

We turned an informal audience survey into a 236-question instrument a researcher could stand behind — covering sleep, nutrition, physical and mental health — designed with academic collaborators at Yeshiva University, who led the analysis. The heavy statistics were theirs; the access was the problem I owned.

A rigorous instrument is worthless if no one fills it out. I led the initiative’s brand and campaign and ran distribution through the channels touring people actually live in — Instagram and adjacent media — and we reached 1,154 of them, a population no clinic could. We fielded it in February and March 2020, the last clear window before COVID shut touring down for years.

That timing was the point, not luck: in an under-instrumented field, evidence has to be designed and operationalized, not just analyzed. Distribution, collaborator trust, and timing decided whether usable data would exist at all.

Where it landed

The dataset produced two peer-reviewed papers — the first in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, which lists me as a co-author — documenting depression, burnout, and suicidality risk across the touring workforce at a scale no one had measured before. The initiative’s launch was covered in Rolling Stone’s feature on the industry’s mental-health reckoning.

And the evidence became a foundation: it fed directly into Amber Health, a touring-industry care service built on what the research proved. Signal became evidence, evidence became publication, and publication became a company.