About GHDonline.org
GHDonline is the platform of Professional Virtual Communities developed and maintained by the Global Health Delivery Project (GHD).
GHDonline enables open collaboration between global health implementers and organizations in online “communities of practice” in order to create a new breadth of knowledge applicable in the field, and democratize access to critical information to improve the delivery of health care worldwide. Public communities focus on critical delivery challenges and are guided by expert moderators.
The Need for GHDonline
The Global Health Delivery Project gathered IT experts and global health practitioners from founding organizations and partners to build GHDonline, a platform for global health practitioners (including volunteers, students) to engage in problem-solving and exchange critical information in order to improve health outcomes in resource-limited settings and the delivery of health care.
Access to and exchange of reliable and current health and professional information can be difficult in the communities that need it most because:
• Subscriptions, dues, and other costs to access information is too expensive..
• Information is too fragmented.
• Health care practitioners in the world’s poorest countries work in isolation.
• Scale-up of services faces a desperate shortage of trained professionals and new approaches.
• Organizations, programs and facilities need people from multiple functional areas - both clinical and non-clinical, and not all organizations have direct access to these resources but also little means of collaborating with or reaching out to external experts.
GHD has chosen a transverse and targeted approach to address these issues by developing communities around key Global Health Delivery areas, and by bringing together practitioners and leaders in the field and guiding them in defining common challenges and goals for each new community. With the mission to improve health care delivery through global collaboration, all of us at GHDonline – members, moderators, and staff - bring forth a vision to democratize access to critical information and to build upon our ‘knowledge’ that, until now, was rarely published.
By joining GHDonline communities, global health practitioners can rapidly disseminate and exchange proven practices and experiences, collaborate with a network of peers at local and international levels for support, and access a growing body of practical information created and recommended by community members, by partners' content and by content published by the GHD Project.
GHDonline Communities
Members of GHDonline communities are professionals working in global health or other services related to the provision of health care, international development, humanitarian projects, but also for-profits, public-private partnerships, universities, architecture firms, etc. Each GHDonline community has a specific mission developed by its own moderators and members.
The following features are available in all communities:
• Discussions, favoring exchange of best practices and knowledge.
• Resources: from documents, guidelines to web links.
• Features: content selected by moderators to be "featured" in the community. "Features" always appear at the top of the home page of each community.
• Email integration: seamless participation via email so members can receive and reply to discussions in communities using their regular email, just like sending an email to a mailing list.
• International collaboration: discuss and add resources in any language!
And by searching the GHDonline Knowledge Base, you can find highly-relevant content from discussions and resources in GHDonline communities, from our partners’ content, and from a comprehensive and regularly updated selection of news feeds and web sites from expert organizations such as the World Health Organization or PubMed.
GHDonline also hosts private communities for specific organizations and collaborative initiatives. For more information, please see our private communities information page.
GHDonline Partners
The GHD Project gathered Information and Communications Technology experts and global health practitioners from founding organizations and partners to build GHDonline, a platform for global health practitioners (including volunteers, students) to engage in problem solving and share information they need to improve health outcomes. At its core, GHDonline is a collaborative effort: members share knowledge that is applicable in the field but not found in traditional media such as vendors’ recommendations or advice on interventions, and partner organizations work with us to provide expert content, services and tools to members.
These custom partnerships provide GHDonline members in resource-limited settings with professional services and content to support their work. For example, UpToDate, Inc., an electronic evidence-based medical information resource and decision-support tool, joined GHDonline.org to provide a limited number of subscriptions to qualifying members who provide health care services in underserved communities outside the U.S. Discussions with organizations to provide platform of collaboration at international conferences so that connections can be made and lessons can be disseminated before, during, and after these gatherings are also ongoing. We invite you to join this unique collaboration effort so please contact us with inquiries or view our current list Partners.
GHDonline Founding Collaborators
• Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
• Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
• Harvard School of Public Health
• Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, Harvard Business School
• Partners In Health
Supporters
Additional support is provided by The Leon Lowenstein Foundation, The Schooner Foundation, and private donors.
Website design: The GHDonline.org site is actively developed and supported in-house by our staff. The layout was designed by Amitabh Handa.