AMIA launches international health informatics partnership

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has launched a non-profit, wholly owned subsidiary organization, called the Global Health Informatics Partnership (GHIP), to serve as an international center for collaborative initiatives on healthcare informatics.

With operational support from AMIA, GHIP aims to build grassroots networks of health informatics advocates and professionals to strengthen informatics capacity in low-resource settings, primarily in South America, Africa and Asia.

Through workshops, literature, training tools, and other mechanisms, GHIP has begun to catalyze collaborative relationships among institutions, which are expected in turn to mentor newer partners and share information that leads to enhanced quality, safety, effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare, AMIA said. All GHIP activities will conform to open standards, open content, and open-access principles and practices, and are guided by established informatics principles.

Robert Mayes has been appointed executive director of GHIP. In his previous position, Mayes served as a senior advisor on health IT issues at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Health IT Program, where he developed and implemented research on health IT and its role in improving quality and safety. His recent work focused on mobile technologies and the role of social networks in healthcare.

GHIP is governed by a newly named board of directors:

• John H. Holmes (chair), PhD, associate professor of medical informatics in epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia;
• Dominik Aronsky, MD, PhD, associate professor of biomedical informatics and emergency medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.;
• Antoine Geissbuhler, MD, professor of medical informatics, chairman of the department of radiology and medical informatics at Geneva University, director of the division of medical informatics at Geneva University Hospitals and president of Health-On-the-Net Foundation;
• Rita Kukafka, PhD, associate professor of biomedical informatics and sociomedical sciences, at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City;
• Gilad Kuperman, MD, PhD, adjunct associate professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia, also, director for interoperability informatics at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the board chair and executive director of NYCLIX, a RHIO in New York City;
• Heimar de Fatima Marin, RN, PhD, professor of health informatics at Universidade Federal de São Paulo, also, a Brazilian-trained nurse with a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical informatics at Harvard Medical School in Boston; and
• Chris Seebregts, PhD, senior manager in biomedical inormatics research at the South African Medical Research Council, associate professor in the computer science department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and executive director of Jembi Health Systems, a South African NGO developing and implementing eHealth and health information systems in Africa.

Mayes will lead the newly formed GHIP team to Cape Town, South Africa, in mid-September, where they will introduce a group of prototypes, called Health Informatics Building Blocks, informatics training modules designed for community health workers in low-resource clinical settings.