In 2012, the Ministry of Health in Rwanda and PIH began a project to promote collaboration between low-income countries to plan and advocate for expanded financing to address the endemic NCDs of extreme poverty such as Burkitt’s lymphoma, type 1 diabetes, epilepsy, and rheumatic heart disease. Gene hopes that this kind of disaggregated data visualization could help clarify what is happening among populations at different income levels within countries as well.

Have you used Gapminder or other data visualization tools? These can be powerful tools for advocacy, but how can we best utilize them? Please let us know if you have questions for Hans in the community, or on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+!

Our commitment to advancing the field of healthcare delivery everywhere is why we are delighted to announce the US Communities Initiative on GHDonline. Supported by funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at the US Department of Health and Human Services, this initiative will develop a series of professional virtual communities specifically for healthcare professionals working with underserved populations in the United States.

We invite those working in the United States to join us in this exciting new endeavor.

We hope you will share your feedback and let us know what community topics you would most like to see by submitting a proposal to the US Communities Initiative on GHDonline. You can also submit ideas for future Expert Panel topics, as well as nominate moderators to lead these new communities.

Within these US-focused communities, as with our current communities, members can discuss innovative approaches in health care delivery, as well as best practices and implementation strategies for providing evidence-based care.

We believe the US Communities Initiative will enrich the GHDonline platform through continued exchange between new and seasoned professionals across geographies, and look forward to facilitating an important cross-pollination of ideas, as well as the dissemination of new, translatable knowledge, for healthcare professionals working in the US and around the world.

We hope you will join us today – as always, we look forward to seeing you in the communities!

January 31, 2013, Neno, Malawi, Partners In Health cofounder Dr. Paul Farmer examines a patient at Neno District Hospital with local clinicians, visiting Global Health Equity residents and Harvard Medical School students.
Credit: Rebecca E. Rollins. Partners In Health

Out today is a new collection of short speeches by our advisor and mentor Dr. Paul Farmer, To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation. This compendium of nineteen commencement speeches, most of which were given at American universities, explore equity challenges.

“This collection of speeches brings us close to Paul Farmer in a way that scholarly publications can’t. In these pages, I hear Paul’s voice clearly: his tenderness, his anger, his passion for justice, the incendiary sense of humor that has regularly doubled me over with laughter for twenty-five years—and often made me worry for Paul’s safety, as he aimed his barbs at the uncaring power holders of this world,” writes Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group and our cofounder.

In this book, Farmer encourages young people to tackle the greatest challenges of our times. The speeches are engaging, often humorous, and always inspiring. They bring to light the brilliance and force of Farmer’s vision in a single, accessible volume. To celebrate this book launch, several events are held across the country (schedule here). To Repair the World is published by the University of California Press and is available through Amazon (a portion of the proceeds go to Partners In Health).

Yale University, New Haven, CT. Unite for Sight Global Health and Innovation Conference 2013.

I’d spent the weekend in the beautiful town of New Haven, Connecticut convening with over 2,000 change-makers at the annual Global Health and Innovation Conference hosted by Unite for Sight. We came together to exchange best practices, learn from one another, and generate innovative ideas that will transform the global health landscape.

Little did I know that the lessons from Tina Rosenberg’s keynote address, “Harnessing the power of peers for global health,” would translate so poignantly to life upon my return to Boston.

The New York Times Fixes columnist’s theme centered on community: how can we channel the pressure of our peers into a powerful, positive force for behavior change in global health? The answer: peer-to-peer motivation, accountability, connection, and support.

Just as the community of Boston has come together in the wake of the Marathon tragedy, we must work together, across disciplines and sectors – from mental to environmental health, engineering to ethics – to create lasting, positive changes in the global health landscape.

Lets learn from one another and discover ways we can connect.

We all hope the Marathon can continue to represent peace, progress, and unity in the days ahead. In these moments, and with our global neighbors in the midst of stress and violence, we seek sanctuary and safety, consolation in you, our community. We are very thankful for reaching out in support.

Hoping we can continue to discuss how to prevent and preserve health, together in strength and solidarity.

Rebecca

In this discussion, Habib speaks to the importance of access to timely data, “Faster, cleaner data definitely helps us manage projects better. We are able to react more quickly to resolve problems (example inappropriate regimens, missed follow-ups etc) than we would have been if we were operating on paper, simply because we have the data available quicker so we find out about them faster.”

This short video highlights one example of how IRD Research has integrated data visualization with electronic medical records to monitor their field sites more effectively:

We hope you will join us for this discussion and share your questions with Ali Habib and colleagues in the Health IT community.

GHD aims to both create and diffuse knowledge in the field of global health delivery. Current offerings support professional implementing value based health care delivery and include curriculum, strategic frameworks, and professional virtual communities on GHDonline.org.

The Computerworld Honors program recognizes organizations and individuals who use information technology to promote and advance public welfare, benefit society and business and change the world for the better. GHD is a Laureate in two categories: collaboration for GHDonline.org and health for our partnership with UpToDate, a leading evidence-based and peer-reviewed clinical information resource.

To date, almost 9,000 health practitioners around the globe collaborate in the GHD communities, and the UpToDate International Grant Subscription Program provides subscriptions to more than 170 organizations and an estimated 8,400 clinicians caring for more than 2 million patients in 45 countries.

Furthermore, recipients of grant subscriptions provide feedback on UpToDate and connect in a private community on GHDonline. This feedback mechanism has inspired the creation and publication of new content by UpToDate and has enabled clinicians and organizations from around the world to connect, and, for some, to form partnerships to advance the delivery of care in their regions.

GHD is honored to join past Laureates like Datadyne’s EpiSurveyor (now named Magpi), a software that allows easy collection of data using mobile devices, and IBM’s World Community Grid which donates unused computer time to humanitarian research.

An Anopheles gambiae mosquito taking a blood meal. Credit: CDC

Please join us next week, April 1-5, for a virtual expert panel to discuss current state and future configuration of anti-vector interventions designed to prevent malaria transmission through the suppression of anopheline mosquito vectors.

Your contributions to this panel will help shape policy and advocacy to further the global fight against malaria by generating a list of “Engineering and Public Health Interventions Against Malaria” which will be discussed at the next African Malaria Coalition (AMC) meeting and will be presented to U.S. electoral representatives and funders by representatives of the AMC.

The discussion will focus on the role of mosquito suppression approaches that may complement or enhance the efficacy of existing and commonly deployed interventions such as insecticide treated nets and indoor residual insecticidal sprays. Complementary approaches may include but are not limited to: screening of homes, environmental modifications of mosquito breeding sites, direct attacks on mosquito larvae, clever design and operation of hydropower, irrigation and water supply systems.

Dr. Bill Jobin is a public health engineer with degrees from MIT in hydraulics and sanitary engineering and a doctorate in tropical public health from Harvard. He has worked for over 50 years, starting in Puerto Rico with the U.S. CDC, then to Sudan on the Blue Nile Health Project with the WHO, continuing on various health impact assessments of large water and energy projects in the tropics for the World Bank and the U.S. government.

In 2005 he helped start the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative, and in 2009 published a report in the WHO Bulletin. He’s authored two technical books, more than 50 articles, and more recently a series of technical monographs.

Bill’s current work focuses on water quality of rivers, lakes, and harbors in the U.S. He’s also steering AMC, which gathers scientists dedicated to the fight against malaria and parasitic diseases. In January, the group met at MIT’s Parsons Lab under the auspices of Prof. Eltahir and discussed the historical perspective on the fight against malaria, the current state of affairs at the WHO, and research projects in Niger and Ethiopia (read Bill’s summary).

Go to the panel discussion today to read more on Bill’s work, sign up (free), and share your thoughts.

By RRZEicons (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Recently, Google announced that it was shutting down Google Reader. This action met with mixed reviews, ranging from a furious outcry from those who still regularly use the service, to apathy, to laughter from those who declared Reader (and by proxy RSS) an ancient technology. I admit my bias in being a regular user of Reader, but I thought the comparison unfair.

Regardless of your stance on the fate of Reader, the fact remains that depending on a 3rd party service, whether personally or as part of your business, is a decision that carries various degrees of risk. This risk is increased if the service is free – paying customers tend to have a loud voice in the corporate ear (not to mention the questionable sustainability of a product that doesn’t have any paying customers).

We do use Google services and products for our work here at GHD — Gmail, Google Drive, Google+ Hangouts, and a few of us have Android phones. However, we have found that we need to be selective about betting the success of our platform on the service of another entity, one that doesn’t share our goals and strategies.

In 2008, we investigated Google Knol as a potential base for our knowledge management platform. We chose to go a different way because we wanted more of a community based discussion format, and it’s a good thing, too.

After building the first version of our own platform, Google released Wave, which was odd and experimental, but generated a lot of positive buzz (no pun intended) in certain circles. There was even a book written about it. We considered whether it was a platform we could use for community discussion, and again decided to keep building our own. Again, we lucked out.

There have been cases we have made the choice to integrate, and those initiatives have met with varying levels of success. We scrapped hosting our own log scraping and reporting utility and went with the very popular Google Analytics. Rather than localizing our site, we opted to integrate Google Translate as a widget. Both of these have worked well for us.

A failure for us was in using the Google Translate API in a project to automatically translate user-generated content into the native language of the reader. We built a successful prototype and we’re pushing toward integration when Google announced that they were removing the API at the end of the year. We scrapped the project.

So, where does this leave us? We know that many of our members rely on free and paid 3rd-party software products/services in their own practices.  We do as well, because doing so allows us to focus on our core work.  In analyzing which product and services to use, we have found a few questions important to consider carefully:

• Is the product or service core to the company’s business model?
• Does their offering meet your needs better than something you could build yourself?
• Can you pay for the product or service?
• If the company folds, drops the product or service, or changes it in a way that makes it unsuitable for your use, what is your fallback plan? Are there comparable offerings from other companies?

In writing this, I fully recognize that many people rely on us to host their communities of practice on GHDonline, and that they are investing their time and energy in adding to the wealth of practical knowledge there.  My hope is that our members use these same questions to analyze us, and that they find us a good fit:

• Communities of practice are core to what we do at GHD.
• We have custom-built GHDonline to the needs of our members, and we continually gather feedback and improve the platform.
• Members do not pay for for GHDonline, thanks to our generous supporters.  Unlike other free services (Gmail, Facebook, etc), we are neither selling our members’ data nor selling space to advertisers.
• We are invested in this effort for the long haul, and our supporters are, as well.  Future changes we make to the platform will be done in coordination with the community leaders.

PS – If you’re looking for a replacement for Google Reader, here are some great alternatives:

• Feedly
• The Old Reader
• NewsBlur

The coming transformation in global health: A conversation with Crisp, Frenk, and Farmer

“Of course, ‘resource poor settings’ is really the latest euphemism for people living in poverty. And people live in poverty all over the world – in affluent countries and in poor countries and poverty is changing rapidly even as technology in medical care is changing rapidly, as well.”

Professor Paul Farmer’s opening to “The coming transformation in global health: A conversation with Crisp, Frenk, and Farmer” held at Harvard Medical School highlighted the need to reframe the way we think about global health. What have we done? What are we doing? What should be done, moving forward, to focus on strengthening health systems?

Credit: Partners In Health

I found Frenk’s discussion of false dichotomies in systems – prevention versus treatment, primary versus secondary and tertiary care, vertical versus horizontal – especially poignant: “If we want universal health coverage to become a reality we need to think about integration.” And Lord Crisp noted, we “have to think much more about society than we used to have to do – and society not just in terms of people’s behavior, because they’re part of the problem as well as part of the solution, but how society is geared and organized to enable people to lead healthy lives.”

Frenk, Crisp, and Farmer concluded by honing in on the dire need for integration and partnerships, between and across disciplines, to enable changes in health systems. On GHDonline, we’ve had conversations on the role of NGOs and integrating M&E in systems strengthening and have learned from many including Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, to name a few. But to really learn from one another, leverage the best ideas, and make a difference on the ground, we need to keep these conversations going.