Global Health Informatics Institute

Over the past 15 years international aid organizations have made large investments in health information technology (HIT) in many low- and middle-income countries.  Sadly these investments have largely focused on improving the quality and timeliness of data for monitoring and evaluation purposes, in many cases relying on the severely limited pool of health workers to capture data.  This has for the most part taken valuable time away from actual healthcare delivery.  Our vision is that decisions around informatics investments be driven by informed understanding of how HIT interventions can support healthcare delivery.

The mission of the Global Health Informatics Institute is to train the next generation of informaticians to be able to shape the use of health information technology investments in an evidence-based way.  We aim to achieve this through focused training and service learning opportunities, and through the development of demonstration sites where reference implementations of new approaches can be closely studied and refined.  Our training is grounded in an approach that emphasizes process-centric HIT interventions that reduce both the cognitive as well as physical burden of healthcare delivery while collecting data as a transparent byproduct of system use.