WHO as an IHE Deployment Committee

Hey Ron -- our next step is to wait for the "launch" meeting to take place between the IHE board co-chairs and the WHO reps. This first meeting has been delayed because of trying to find a suitable time between the very-busy schedules of these parties (and their colleagues on each side) and the slings and arrows of outrageous timezones.

After the launch meeting there will be, I hope, roles for worker bees to start to "make it happen". I'm thrilled that you'd be interested in being a bee! I'll post updates to this thread as things progress and we can start to take actionable steps. BTW... so proud of how much Canada is contributing to this -- we very much punch out of our weight class re: global digital health.

Hey Derek.

This is a great idea, and I have my particular reasons to participate. How does one get engaged?

Rp

I had a chance, last week in Geneva, to progress the ongoing discussions with WHO about a super-cool IHE-WHO initiative to improve support for digital health infrastructure projects within the 130+ low and middle-income countries (LMIC) that, today, are not part of IHE (or any other digital health standards organization, for that matter). This initiative is being led, on the WHO side, by my friend and colleague Garrett Mehl and on the IHE side by IHE International's board co-chairs -- Mike McCoy and David Mendelson.

This IHE-WHO initiative has been a pet project of mine for over a year, now. As some of you may know, much of my work these last 8 years has been in LMICs. A number of these countries (e.g. Tanzania, South Africa, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc.) are now moving forward with national-scale digital health infrastructure projects -- very much like what we were doing here in Canada in 2006 and during the years following. It would be a great help to these countries to be able to support conformance-testing of digital health solutions so they can operationalize national-scale "health interoperability layer" initiatives. (Sound familiar? The architecture for these LMIC projects is actually a riff on our own dear Infoway blueprint: OpenHIE ).

That's where the idea of an IHE-WHO Deployment Committee comes in. IHE deployment committees (think IHE-Canada, IHE-USA, IHE-France, IHE-Japan, etc.) are the ones who host IHE Connectathons. Well... kinda. In reality, a Connectathon is usually hosted by a group of deployment committees (e.g. IHE Europe). IHE-Europe is a perfect example of how IHE-WHO might work. IHE-Europe is an umbrella organization with individual country members. Likewise, IHE-WHO would be an umbrella organization with individual country members. The key difference is that the membership of IHE-Europe is based on geography whereas the membership in IHE-WHO would be based on economic status (e.g. being a low or middle income country, as classified by the World Bank ). The upshot of all this is that IHE-WHO could help LMICs host Connectathons suited to their geographic locations and their economic contexts. Think of a low-cost (or fully donor-supported) Connectathon being hosted in Dar es Salaam in support Tanzania's national digital health infrastructure initiative and you're getting the idea.

There is a short video describing this IHE-WHO idea here .
I know a number in our community are also engaged in global eHealth work. I'd very much welcome thoughts and ideas about how we might help this important project move forward. If you have some feedback, please add a comment to this thread. The topic will be discussed at the upcoming IHE Board meeting at the end of November.