Establishing a Global Collaboration to Support the Global Public Health Grid Initiative

Global public health is challenged by the lack of wide-spread, standards-based interoperable informatics tools to interoperate data silos.  To solve these challenges and improve global public health, early investment in a global public health informatics approach requires engagement of international stakeholders and technical experts.  Such an approach could leverage advances in public health informatics and emerging technologies such as grid computing by supporting global standards.

 

The proposed World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Public Health Informatics (WHO-CCPHI) hosted by the National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) is spearheading the development of a Global Public Health Grid Collaboration (GPHGC).  The National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (CaBIG) team is assisting WHO-CCPHI in this activity.  Preliminary focus of the group is on development of collaborative teams to support WHO’s Global Health Observatory (GHO) and Suite of Interoperable Tools and Services (SITS) initiatives.

 

To facilitate the development of the collaboration and promote knowledge sharing among international partners, a number of methodologies are being used: development of online collaborative portal where global public health and informatics stakeholders and subject matter experts discuss global public health use cases that can potentially benefit from grid and other emerging technical architectures; development of a roster of global experts to facilitate cross cutting projects; setting up a quarterly global webinar; and convening meetings of international partners on global informatics issues.  

 

GPHGC is established on the foundations of the following domains: public health use cases, research and development, architecture, education, policy, evaluation, and interoperability standards.  Further, online work-spaces are set up for collaboration on policy (e.g., governance, data stewardship), standards (e.g., interoperability framework, tools compatibility guideline based on minimum standards), and the enabling grid technology, among other domains.

 

GPHGC’s goals, strategy, partners, experiences, lessons learned, and next steps e.g. how attendees can get involved, will be presented.