Sharing Health Information

Sharing Health Information

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The Fogarty International Center, part of United States Department of Health and Human Service's National Institutes of Health, or NIH, will award more than $9.23 million to 8 global health informatics [information processing, storage, and distribution] programs over the next 5 years.

The NIH made the announcement October 14, and added that the award will include a $1.23 million grant to the University of California, San Diego to support the Biomedical Research Informatics for the Global Health Training or BRIGHT program.

The BRIGHT program was initially developed to build informatics capacity in medium and low-income settings in Brazil. The funding will allow for expansion outside the city of Sao Paulo, to northern areas of Brazil and to Maputo, Mozambique.

"Our aim is to concentrate on health areas of particular relevance to Brazil and Mozambique and that have high impact on global health, such as HIV/AIDS, cervical, colon, and breast cancer," lead investigator Dr. Lucila Ohno-Machado, founding chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics in the University of California, San Diego Department of Medicine.

Two of the new Fogarty International Center grants will fund informatics programs between the University of Pittsburg and Javeriana University in Bogotá, Colombia; and between Oregon Health and Science University and the Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Another grant will support the creation of the Andean Global Health Informatics Research and Training Center. The center will be administered by the Cayetano Heredia University in Lima, Peru, with the participation of the United States Naval Medical Research Center Detachment in Lima, the University of Cauca in Colombia, the Andina University of Simon Bolivar in Ecuador and the University of Washington in Seattle.

A collaboration among researchers from the University of Georgia, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation Rene Rachou Research Institute and Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, will use its grant to bolster an existing training project by expanding into new areas of bioinformatics, epidemiology and molecular evolution, with a focus on tropical parasites.

Fogarty International Center grants will also support informatics programs in India, South Africa and Kenya.

The United States remains committed to supporting and sharing medical research and health information with its public and private partners throughout the world.