World Health Grid

Charles Henry
Vice President and CIO
Rice University

Geneva Henry
Executive Director, The Connexions Project
Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative
Rice University

Twenty-seven thousand children aged five and under die from preventable causes each day. These deaths occur predominantly in poor and less developing countries. Stated another way, approximately 85 per cent of all the children who die in impoverished conditions could be saved through routine medical intervention. In order to establish a sustained and systemic solution for the reduction of poverty and improvement of health, policy changes at the national and international level are requisite, as is the construction of an effective technology-based delivery infrastructure, with information, medicine, expertise, and food among those items needed most critically. This project speaks to one facet of such a challenge, the technical infrastructure needed to deliver information and expertise to remote areas of the developing world, and concomitantly collect information from those remote sites that would aid in the understanding of disease prevention and promote a program of health maintenance. This project, called the World Health Grid, is conceived as an application of existing information technology economically deployed for a global public good. The World Health Grid is, in essence, a digital library project, and has elements of content creation, management, searching, analysis, federation of disparate data sources, and network topology that are common to digital library project planning: appropriating the knowledge of modern librarianship and applying it to large-scale social phenomena.