Global Public Health Informatics - Vision, Challenges and Progress

The last fifty years have witnessed the advance of information and communications technology (ICT) in the "developed" world. Advances such as electronic health records; point of need delivery of decision support tools and environmental health and disease surveillance programs; among many others, play an important and increasing role in improving health and in disease prevention. In the developing world, however, numerous factors contribute to a persistent "digital divide" that threaten to blunt the impact of ICT and stymie the potential benefits that may accrue from insightful application of these technologies for improving health, including: fragmented health information infrastructure at all levels, workforce competencies in ICT, and lack of access to current and relevant decision support data and information. Ad hoc "work-around" solutions, such as remote development and maintenance of information systems, help surmount some of the barriers but remain isolated examples in the absence of an integrating infrastructure to support systemic improvements across the fragmented health information systems. Is there a public health informatics role in enabling the transfer of knowledge and technology from the developed to the developing world and vice-versa? What lessons might we learn from innovative applications of ICT in low-resource settings globally that might be relevant to challenges in low-resource settings in the U.S.? Can public health informatics provide the bridge that is needed to cross this digital divide? This presentation describes the vision, challenges and current progress in creating the Global Partners in Public Health Informatics, a group of organizations, institutions, corporations and individuals focused on evolving sustainable and interoperable public health ICT solutions throughout the world. Included in this presentation are early findings from the recent Rockefeller Foundation E-Health Initiative for the Global South meeting in Bellagio, Italy and current global public health informatics planning by the CDC National Center for Public Health Informatics.