About the Global Health Policy Working Group
Highlights from the 2011 Global Health Policy Working Group Meeting
Featured Meeting Abstracts
Collaborations
Global Reach of Medical Decision Making Journal
Featured Member Profiles
Featured Global Health Policy Program
SMDM International Travel Scholarship Program
Contact Information

About the Global Health Policy Working Group

Our mission is to build a community of global health policy researchers within SMDM that includes researchers from high, middle and low-income countries. Our current initiatives include:

Highlights from the 2011 Global Health Policy Working Group Meeting

The SMDM Global Health Working Group held a meeting on October 24, 2011 at the SMDM Annual Meeting. Over 30 researchers and government representatives from around the world with a variety of backgrounds and from diverse academic disciplines came together to discuss the progress of the Global Health Working Group work since last year and decide on directions for future collaboration. Attendees included 12 recipients of 2011 International Travel Scholarships from the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, China Health Economic Institute, Chinese Ministry of Health and a provincial health authority, Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy in Buenos Aires, American University of Armenia, and India-Singapore Collaboration for Evidence-Based Medical Decision Making. Also in attendance were representatives from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johnson & Johnson Medical Asia Pacific who assisted in obtaining funding for the travel awards.

The group discussed the successful collaboration on "Prices and Affordability of Essential Medicines across Pacific Latin America during Economic Crisis," that started as a result of discussions at SMDM Global Health Working Group Meeting in 2010. We discussed opportunities to expand the project to more countries and to medical procedures in addition to medicines. We also discussed starting new collaborations and sustained interactions among researchers in low and middle income countries about how to advance proactive systematic approaches in clinical decision making and evidence based policy formation to improve health outcomes.

Featured Meeting Abstracts

Click below for links to featured SMDM meeting abstracts on global health topics.

Abstracts were presented at the 2011 SMDM Annual Meeting on a variety of global health challenges such as preventing infectious diseases (HIV, HPV, and influenza), improving maternal and child health, and controlling obesity and hypertension in low and middle income countries including India, China, Vietnam, Haiti, South Africa, Armenia, and Poland.

Abstracts presented at the 2010 SMDM Annual meeting of relevance to global health were on a variety of topics including tuberculosis control, HIV treatment, surgical care, cancer screening, health insurance coverage, and  teaching and implementing medical decision making, and the research used data from a diverse set of countries including Ivory Coast, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, Ecuador, and Armenia.

Collaborations

Members from the SMDM Global Health Policy Working Group, Ulises Garay, Patricia Granja, Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert and Leslie Wilson, have received funding from Executive Committee of the Pacific Rim Research Program for a 2011-12, 2012-13 Initiative Grant proposal, "Prices and Affordability of Essential Medicines across Pacific Latin America during Economic Crisis". The objective of the project is to determine the affordability of essential medicines across Pacific Latin American countries during recent economic crises using different methods for calculating purchasing power parities. Countries of the Pacific Rim share deep historical and cultural connections and our partners and their residing countries (Argentina and Ecuador) represent a diversity of political, economic and cultural situations among themselves. Medicines account for 20 to 60% of health spending in these countries and most comes from out-of-pocket payments. We will use the WHO/HAI guidelines for collection of medication price and access data. We will determine prices using different types of exchange rates, and calculate the affordability for each country. This work will allow us to determine the differences in prices and affordability of medicines across these countries during economic change.

Congratulations to Ulises, Patricia, Jeremy and Leslie for launching our first grant funded research collaboration!

Global Reach of Medical Decision Making Journal

Medical Decision Making is the official journal of SMDM and has been published since 1981. The journal is a peer reviewed and published monthly, providing rigorous and systematic research on approaches to decision making. It integrates knowledge and evidence from various disciplines, including decision psychology, health economics and clinical epidemiology. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and is widely available to scholars and readers in low income countries through Research4Life.

For the 4-month period between May 1, 2010 and October 31, 2011 the journal's website had 260,798 visits from 198 countries or territories throughout the world. There were almost 7,000 visits from India, more than 4,000 visits from China, more than 2,000 visits from the Philippines, Brazil, and Malaysia, and more than 1,000 visits from Thailand, Iran, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa.

Twenty four percent of the institutions that have access to the journal (including regular subscription and through Research4Life) are found in Europe and an equal percent in Africa. Sixteen percent are found in the United States, 12% in South America, 9% in Asia, 5% in Southeast Asia, 4% in the Middle East, 2% in Southwestern Asia, 2% in North America (excluding US) and 2% in Australasia.

Featured Member Profiles

Ulises Garay is researcher at the Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy (IECS) and the Immunizations Program of the National Ministry of Health in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has a degree in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires and is studying for a Masters in Epidemiology, Health Policy, and Management at the National University of Lanus. He previously worked at an economic consulting company and in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Social Development . His primary research is in the area of economic evaluations of health technology, and he recently contributed to a review of economic evaluation guidelines in Latin America.

Ruzanna Grigoryan received her MD from the Yerevan State Medical University in Armenia in 2005. From 2005-2006 she worked as a General Practitioner in the University Clinical Hospital in Armenia. In 2007 she received her MPH from the American University of Armenia (affiliated with the University of California and accredited by WASC). Since then she has been working at the Center for Health Services Research and Development of the American University of Armenia on various public health research projects as a Research Associate/Project Coordinator. She has conducted several comprehensive assessments and studies and has served as a Teaching Associate at the College of Health Science (affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health) of the American University of Armenia for several public health courses. Dr. Grigoryan has expertise in conducting both qualitative and quantitative research. She has presented her works in several international scientific meetings and conferences.

April D. Kimmel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Healthcare Policy Research at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. She holds a baccalaureate degree from Dartmouth College, a Master's degree in Population and International Health from Harvard School of Public Health, and a PhD in Health Policy, concentrating in decision sciences, from Harvard University. Her research focuses on priority setting for HIV/AIDS treatment scale-up in resource-limited settings and drawing upon decision analytic methods to illustrate efficiency/equity trade-offs in policymaking. She has developed and used mathematical models to assess the population health consequences of HIV treatment scale-up and discontinuing HIV treatment when resources are inadequate, and to evaluate the value of routine laboratory monitoring for treatment management of HIV-infected individuals in both developed and developing countries. She has also examined HIV/AIDS treatment priorities of South African policymakers and has developed a quantitative framework for assessing ethical preferences for providing HIV treatment in this setting. Dr. Kimmel received the Lee Lusted Award in Applied Health Economics, Services, and Policy Research at the 2011 SMDM Annual meeting for her post-doctoral study INTERNAL VALIDATION AND CALIBRATION OF A MODEL TO FORECAST HIV TREATMENT DEMAND AND CAPACITY IN HAITI."

Claudia C. Pereira is a researcher at the National School of Public Health, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation - FIOCRUZ/Brazilian Health Ministry in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She received her PhD in Population Health from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 2009. She also holds a Master's degree in Demography from CEDEPLAR - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. From 2009 to 2010 she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she conducted economic evaluations of health techonologies. Her current research areas include health technology assessment, such as systematic reviews and economic evaluations of screening tests for hepatitis C and prevention of oral diseases; evaluation of clinical guidelines; valuation of health states and public health assessment in Africa.

Anushua Sinha is an infectious diseases physician and researcher at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. She received her MD from Harvard Medical School and her MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. Her global health projects include the cost-effectiveness of Group B Streptococcal Vaccination in southern sub-Saharan Africa in collaboration with colleagues from Centers for Disease Control and Rutgers; the Pan-American Health Organization's ProVac Initiative to promote and disseminate evidence-based decision-making capacity for new vaccine introduction in the WHO Region of the Americas (http://new.paho.org/provac/); and the economic burden of lower respiratory tract infection in Southern African Children in collaboration with investigators from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Emory University, and the University of Witwatersrand.

Jef Van den Ende worked as a tropical doctor in Dungu, Zaire, for 6 years. He received his MD degree from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He specialized in internal medicine at the same university, and in tropical medicine at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp (IMTA). He also graduated in piano at the conservatory of Leuven in 1973, and in chamber music at the conservatory of Mechelen in 1988. From 1986 until 2000 he headed the policlinic of IMTA, where his currently chief of the department of clinical sciences. He was appointed lecturer in tropical medicine in 1993. In 1996 he wrote his PhD on imported malaria at the University of Amsterdam. From 2000 to 2003 he was on sabbatical leave in Kigali, Rwanda. Besides tropical medicine and piano playing, he is active in clinical decision making, artificial intelligence and computer based training. In the field of global health he concentrates on research in patient and doctors' preferences, and in teaching clinical decision making in undergraduate and postgraduate training.

Kun Zhao is a researcher in the Division of Health Technology Assessment and Policy Evaluation in the China National Health Development Research Center of the Ministry of Health in Beijing, China. She received her medical degree from China Medical University and has masters degrees from the Capital University of Medical Sciences in Beijing and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of British Columbia. She is currently a PhD candidate in Health Economics Evaluation in the Faculty of Applied Health Science at he University of Waterloo, Canada. Her current research projects include the policy and technology evaluation of "Healthy China 2020"; evaluation of clinical pathways in rural China; a cost-benefit analysis of H1N1 influenza prevention measures in China; a comparison of community healthcare service among 37 facilities with different ownerships in China; and a cost-effectiveness analysis of stroke treatment models of treatment in China.

SMDM International Travel Scholarship Program

At the 2010 annual meeting, SMDM provided travel scholarships to seven attendees from middle-income countries as a pilot program funded by a one-time grant. In 2011 the program was expanded include applicants from select low-income countries and provided twelve partial or full scholarships. We would like to make international travel scholarships for attendees from middle-income and selected low-income countries a permanent part of the SMDM annual and European SMDM biennial meetings. We need help in identifying and applying for funding from government, NGO, foundation, and corporate donors. If you have specific names of contacts to whom you can introduce us who might be interested in funding this program, please contact Bruce Schackman at brs2006@med.cornell.edu.

See the article about the experience of one scholarship awardee at the 2010 Annual meeting in the SMDM Winter 2011 newsletter: Perspectives from a New SMDM International Travel Scholar.

In 2012, we are for the first time offering International Travel Scholarships to attend the Biennial European SMDM meeting. For more information, see 2012 European SMDM Meeting Travel Scholarship Application. Note the deadline for applications is February 3, 2012

Contact Information

Global Health Policy Working Group:
Chair: Bruce R. Schackman, PhD

Co-Chairs: Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, PhD jeremygf@stanford.edu