George Institute joins Grand Challenges in Global Health collaboration
The George Institute has entered into a collaboration to contribute to the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium Project, which has received funding from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.
The project is working on Grand Challenge #13 - to measure health status accurately and economically in developing countries. Reliable methods of estimating population health status are central for planning health improvements in any population. Such methods are currently deficient in the less developed settings where health improvement planning is most needed.
Led by the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, the project includes research teams from the University of Queensland, Johns Hopkins University and the Broad Institute and pursues a creative and bold research approach by wedding epidemiology, biomedical research, and population health assessment.
The project will produce new measurement tools that are science-based, standardised and widely applicable across different resource-poor settings. The tools developed will be of use to policymakers and researchers to address persistent inequities in health outcomes.
Institute investigators will be working on this project in Andhra Pradesh state in southern India through George Institute India established recently in Hyderabad, while other collaborators will be doing similar studies in northern India, the Philippines and Tanzania.