Global Public Health Grid - WHO-CDC Public Health Informatics Initiative: Value Proposition and Pilot Projects

Currently, public health faces challenges of widely distributed and rapidly growing data; limited accessibility, visualization, analyses, and use for decision-making; and poorly coordinated, and non-interoperable information systems and applications that lead to duplication of efforts and wastage of resources, and low sustainability. To solve the above challenges, there is growing consensus in the global informatics community to move towards collaborative, distributed development and architecture.

 World Health Organization (WHO) and National Center of Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) have forged collaboration on a Global Public Health Grid (GPHG) initiative to enable global data exchange and collaborative development of globally shareable and interoperable systems, tools and services.  GPHG aims to improve global public health by providing a standards-based informatics platform, and collaboratively developing and implementing a wide range of public health informatics applications and services leveraging widely distributed global expertise, thus enabling dissemination and exchange of information across different jurisdictional levels.  GPHG efforts will support WHO’s Global Health Observatory (GHO) and Suite of Interoperable Tools and Services (SITS) projects. The goal of GHO is to support more up-to-date data sharing and access, encourage transparency and meet informatics standards, by providing data as services on a grid platform. Grid nodes may be set up at WHO Regional centers and National Ministries of Health to enable more timely access to information. SITS aims to support the development and availability of open-source standards-based interoperable tools and services for data collection, management and exchange; analysis, visualization and reporting; and collaboration. The goal is to provide such tools for lightweight download and installation in low resource settings, or use as services or applications over the Internet.

 

GPHG’s goals, structure, stakeholders and experiences to-date during development of use case and architecture, and planned installation of grid nodes at key international locations and next steps will be described and discussed.