Sharing essential knowledge with health researchers and policy makers

Communities of practice

Health information is a social determinant of health

4 Aug 2008

Muza Gondwe

Source: TropIKA.net (see original article)

A series of conferences is seeking to advance the development of what has become known as ‘eHealth’.

Several definitions exist for eHealth but it can be considered as the use of information and communications technology to support health systems. eHealth has emerged as a promising frontier for improving access, affordability, and quality health care and disease prevention for all.

‘Making the eHealth Connection’ is a four-week conference series organized by the Rockefeller Foundation which is taking place in Bellagio, Italy from July to August 2008. The aim of the conference is to promote international understanding and cooperation, to encourage creative thinking and investment commitments around a global eHealth agenda.

The conference has two parallel conferences a week, each on a different subject track. There are eight subject tracks: eHealth markets, access to information and knowledge sharing, electronic health records, interoperability, public health informatics and national health information systems, national eHealth policies, eHealth capacity building, and mobile health and telemedicine. The track on access to health information and knowledge sharing took place from the 20th to the 25th July. It was convened by Rockefeller Foundation and the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information of the Pan American Health Organization (BIREME). It was chaired by Abel Packer, Director of BIREME.

This track was a convergence of 30 people from across the world. Amongst the group were librarians, editors, knowledge managers, policy makers, academicians, lobbyists, and technology producers. The meeting agreed that increasing access to health information and improving knowledge sharing can greatly improve health care and disease prevention. Discussions began around the barriers to health information and knowledge sharing, which became an ever growing list that included connectivity, copyright, economy, information technology literacy, culture, infrastructure, human capacity, poor visibility of and access to national information and lack of government support. In the following days, presentations were given on possible solutions and tools to overcome barriers such as communities of practice, wikis, digital libraries, and web portals.

The group concluded that health information is a social determinant of health, since inequities in access to information and knowledge generate and/or increase health inequities. In their closing remarks, they recommend that health information policies should become part of health policy in order to strengthen the use of information, knowledge, and evidence in decision making. They surmised that, since eHealth involves different stakeholders with different interests and needs, it therefore requires that several solutions be developed to suit different contexts. They proposed that national and global research programmes should be established to identify information needs, to determine barriers to access, translation and use of information and to evaluate the impact of information and knowledge sharing interventions on health outcomes.

They recommended that efforts and resources should be mobilized towards the creation of an environment that will enable producers, intermediaries and users to develop and share content, methods and technologies. The purpose of this new environment will be to increase the use of health information and promote knowledge sharing with a focus on international cooperation for the development of health information infrastructure and human resources.