Glossary of terms

HIFA2015 Glossary of Terms

HIFA2015 goal

By 2015, every person worldwide will have access to an informed healthcare provider – lack of relevant, reliable healthcare information will no longer be a major contributor to avoidable death and suffering.

Informed: has the knowledge and/or the tools to acquire appropriate information to inform health care decision making. For example, a mother in rural Nigeria knows, or is able to find out, that a child with diarrhoea is at risk of dehydration and should maintain his or her fluid intake. And a doctor in Pakistan knows, or is able to find out, that a person with high blood pressure should be treated with antihypertensives, not sedatives.

Healthcare provider: any person who is responsible for the health care of another person at any time. This includes ordinary citizens (mothers, family caregivers and others) as well as health workers. For example, if a truck driver in Kenya comes upon the scene of a road traffic accident with no other persons present, he or she is the provider of health care until someone with more experience takes over. For the truck driver to be ‘informed’ means the truck driver has some basic first aid knowledge and/or recognises that help is needed and knows how to get it.

HIFA2015 strategy

Communication

HIFA2015 Forum: The HIFA2015 email discussion forum is the main communication tool for HIFA2015 members to learn, network, and share experience and expertise on how to improve the availability and use of appropriate healthcare information

Change agents: A change agent is any HIFA2015 member who is committed to the purpose of improving the availability and use of appropriate healthcare information worldwide, either in a general or in a specific sense (eg some members may be especially interested in the availability of information in a specific geographical area such as India, or the availability of information for a specific clinical context such as child pneumonia, or the availability of information for a specific group of healthcare providers such as midwives)

Understanding

HIFA2015 Knowledge Base: The HIFA2015 Knowledge Base aims to capture and organise the ideas, perspectives and experience of HIFA2015 members. It is currently being redeveloped and will be relaunched this year. In time, it will contain all key points relating to the information needs and ways of meeting those needs, as expressed by HIFA2015 members. The Knowledge Base will consist of extracts from HIFA2015 messages. These extracts are called HIFA-Lumps. Each HIFA-Lump is tagged with key words before it is added to the Knowledge Base. This means it will be easy to search the Knowledge Base to find HIFA-Lumps relating to (for example) Africa and/or mobile phones and/or malaria. Currently we are integrating several hundred HIFA-lumps with help from the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, University of Toronto, and World Health Organization, Geneva. The new HIFA2015 Knowledge Base will be launched in autumn 2011. We are confident it will really help us individually and collectively to meet the needs of healthcare providers. Also, importantly, it will add to the evidence base needed to persuade governments and funding agencies to invest with confidence in health information services.

Advocacy

HIFA2015 Advocacy programme: Advocacy here refers to the individual and collective ability and action of HIFA2015 members to (1) raise global and national awareness of the importance of improving the availability of healthcare information for healthcare providers, and (2) persuade governments, funding agencies and others to invest more, and more cost-effectively, in any and all actions and services that will improve the availability of healthcare information. Our premise is that effective advocacy requires collective understanding.

Action

Improved communication, understanding and advocacy is expected to lead to increased effectiveness – both individually and collectively – of actions and services by all those who produce, exchange and use healthcare knowledge.

Global Healthcare Information System: This refers to all processes involved in the production, publication, exchange and application of evidence-based health knowledge. The system is described variously by different authors. For HIFA2015, we use a modification of the system described by Godlee et al (2004). The main components of this system are:
• Understanding information needs
• Undertaking health research
• Publishing of health research
• Systematic review of health research
• Generic guideline development
• Production of appropriate reference and learning materials for end-users
• Making appropriate reference and learning materials available to end-users
• Facilitating the identification and use of appropriate healthcare information
• Measuring the impact of healthcare information