News

The Global Health Blog (launch August 2010) is a new project of PubHealth.org to combine thoughtful, original content by PubHealth writers with the power of the groundbreaking Swift River aggregator to bring you some of the best online global health news, commentary and resources. By providing a single, dynamic portal to highlight bloggers, tweets, forums, calendars, and other feeds, we hope to create a place to share ideas, enthusiasm and some healthy skepticism.

The PubHealth blogging team has backgrounds in medicine, public health, journalism and computer programming. If you know of a website, blog, twitter feed, forum, calendar or other source of global health news and information, please Tell us about a good source.

Maps

The number of global health projects continues to increase exponentially. With tens of billions of dollars being spent, hundreds of thousands of projects underway, and no mechanism to see where projects are and who is doing or has already done them, there is significant duplication of efforts. PubHealth in collaboration with numerous partners, is modifying the groundbreaking opensource mapping software by Ushahidi to create an online tool to map global health projects geographically and temporally.

This site will include features for automatic project tracking, location based interaction using SMS or the web for those in the field, and customization and searchability of maps by project type and keywords. This tool can map everything from MOH Clinics, to Malaria research projects completed or ongoing, to individuals implementing health IT software in remote sites. We hope this tool will be used by everyone from ministries of health to NGOs to independent project coordinators in order to track global health projects and ensure maximum harmonization.

About

PubHealth.org is an initiative to create tools for promoting harmonization within the global health community. The site currently under construction aims to provide a portal where individuals and organizations committed to improving global health can share and learn with a planned beta launch date of our first set of tools in the Fall of 2010. The team at PubHealth.org includes people with backgrounds in medicine, public health, journalism and computer science from around the world. By syncing their diverse areas of expertise around a common interest in global public health, we hope to provide users with interesting and novel tools for promoting harmonization.

Background: "Harmonization" is the degree to which global health efforts (research, clinical, etc) share information and coordinate with each other to avoid duplication of efforts and maximize efficacy. The Paris Declaration (PD) (2005) and Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) (2008) outlined the critical need for higher levels of collaboration, transparency and coordination between research efforts, both at national and international levels. The lack of harmonization among care providers, volunteers, donors, NGOs, governments and others leads to duplication of efforts, diminished benefits from collaboration, unnecessary competition for funding and hindrance of progress

Contact

We're currently looking for individuals with experience in global health and online technologies, interest in the Pubhealth mission, and wouldn't mind if you have a background in graphic design and computer programming, too. For more information please e-mail development@pubhealth.org.