Global Health Security

Project HOPE helps strengthen health systems that can detect, prevent, and respond to public health threats.

A Threat Anywhere Is a Threat Everywhere

The increasing interconnectedness of our world has transformed the landscape of global health. Infectious diseases can travel and spread like never before, putting the entire world population at heightened risk.

COVID-19 has highlighted the urgency of this risk, sweeping across the globe in a matter of months and quickly becoming one of the gravest threats to global health in our lifetimes.

The pandemic has taken over 1.5 million lives, cost billions of dollars, and disrupted access to essential health services. It has exposed the weak points and shortages of our health systems — a lack of preparedness and a range of gaps in countries’ abilities to prevent, detect, and respond to the virus.

But it will not be the last disease to put the world’s health at risk. COVID-19 is only one of the health threats that jeopardizes the lives and well-being of people worldwide.

That’s why Project HOPE is working to build health systems that are strong, resilient, and prepared to tackle public health threats, whenever and wherever they arise. With the entire world reeling from the fight against COVID-19, the cry for greater global health security has never been louder.

The Multi-faceted Threat of Infectious Disease

“We live in a more densely populated and interconnected world than ever before. We’ve already seen what the threat of infectious disease can be — and that threat continues to grow.”

Chris Skopec, Project HOPE’s Executive Vice President for Global Health

Even before COVID-19, the threat of a pandemic had never been greater. New diseases emerge every year as a result of climate change, while globalization enables them to spread farther and faster.

Most infectious diseases are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted to people by animals. More than 6 out of every 10 known infectious diseases in people can be spread from animals.

The impacts of disease crises are devastating and long-lasting. Past outbreaks such as SARS (2002), H1N1 influenza (2009), MERS-CoV (2012), H7N9 influenza (2013), and Ebola (2014) have had significant human, security, and economic effects, felt across every level of society — on national, regional, and global scales. These diseases take lives, threaten food security, destabilize governments, and disrupt economies.

And at any moment they can resurface. Without the right information, sufficient staffing, and available vaccines, health systems can be quickly overwhelmed and pushed to their limits.

How Project HOPE is Responding

Disease Surveillance and Early Warning and Response in Indonesia

Under the CDC-funded Global Health Security program, Improving the Quality of Disease Preparedness, Surveillance and Response in Indonesia (INSPIRASI), we are providing technical assistance to the Ministry of Health to improve real-time surveillance and reporting for Indonesia’s Early Warning and Response System (EWARS). Project HOPE’s role is to map and define data standards between the primary health care information system, hospital claim information system, national health insurance information system, and the national EWARS.

In February 2022, Project HOPE published an article on the program in the International Journal of Environment Research and Public Health. Global COVID-19 outbreaks in early 2020 have burdened health workers, among them surveillance workers who have the responsibility to undertake routine disease surveillance activities. The aim of this study was to describe the quality of the implementation of Indonesia’s Early Warning and Response Alert System (EWARS) for disease surveillance and to measure the burden of disease surveillance reporting quality before and during the COVID-19 epidemic in Indonesia.

Concept of Interoperability between Health Information Systems

After meetings with several stakeholders, Project HOPE developed a framework for interoperability that includes a Health Information System interoperability architecture adopted from OpenHIE. An important component of the OpenHIE is the data and metadata standards layer, which is key to data integration and information system interoperability. The conclusion of various stakeholder meetings indicated that there were several point-of-care (POC) information systems that can improve the effectiveness of EWARS and overall disease surveillance.

Data mapping between various health information systems was conducted to determine the interoperability between systems by equating data standards and data values between the information systems used. The interoperability approach with Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) can encourage the use of data standards between the following information systems:

  • National insurance agency (BPJSK),
  • (P-Care, hospital claim through V-claim),
  • Health facility information systems (SIMPUS and SIMRS)
  • EWARS

The interoperability approach with FHIR can encourage the use of data standards between the aforementioned health information and the EWARS. Using certain algorithms to the aggregate data from each of these systems, the EWARS systems can automatically aggregate the data and generate alerts and notifications as signs of possible disease outbreaks on a weekly basis. Project HOPE is also providing technical support on implementing data-sharing agreements; developing a Roadmap for Interoperability; and standardizing clinical message standards and codes between various health information systems. The goal of mapping data standards and definitions and data sharing needs is to describe the current state of electronic disease data components and data standards and definitions that are currently used by different stakeholders.

SARS-CoV-2 surveillance infection among healthcare providers in Jordan

Project HOPE is working on a CDC-funded program with CRDF Global to provide a technical assistance program to strengthen detection and prevention of health acquired infections (HAI) and COVID-19 variances among healthcare workers in a network of hospitals and laboratories. Project HOPE is developing training modules for analysis, sharing, and use of data for detection, reporting, and management of SARS-CoV-2 variances. The technical assistance to the Jordan HAI/AMR Surveillance and Prevention Network (JHASP) and the Ministry of Health will include analysis, sharing, and use of data on SARS-CoV-2 variances among health care workers to inform infection, control, and prevention interventions.

Capacity building on IPC, Case Management, and Vaccinology of COVID-19

Since February 2020, Project HOPE has partnered with the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at the Watson Institute of Brown University to develop and implement a COVID-19 curriculum to support rapid scale-up of response efforts in high-risk countries. The curriculum is delivered through a live, virtual platform and designed utilizing a training-of-trainers approach, focusing on eight core modules:

  1. COVID-19 Background
  2. Infection Prevention and Control
  3. Surveillance, Screening, and Triage
  4. Diagnosis and Management
  5. Stabilization and Resuscitation
  6. Medical Surge Operations Planning
  7. Risk Communication
  8. Public Health Messaging

The curriculum is frequently updated based on best practices and evidence on COVID-19 in line with recommendations from the World Health Organization. With support from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, Project HOPE further scaled up trainings in coordination with key regional partners including ministries of health, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the Brazilian Field Epidemiology Professionals Association, leading medical universities, and others. There is also an Acute COVID-19 Care training for health service delivery. More than 107,146 health care professionals have been trained across 151 countries and territories.

Currently, Project HOPE is delivering a series of training-of-trainers sessions on COVID-19 vaccine science through the Africa CDC to support the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines into Africa, initially through an MTN donation of 20 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to 20 countries. The modules include Vaccine Science, Vaccine Access, and Vaccine Hesitancy. To date, more than 500 health workers in 35 countries have been selected by their Ministries of Health through the convening power of the Africa CDC. Trainings are being conducted in English, French, Portuguese, and Arabic. Through this partnership, Project HOPE has established itself as the primary training partner for the Africa CDC on COVID-19 case management and vaccinology. The COVID-19 vaccine training will soon be extended to Latin America and parts of Asia.

COVID-19 eLearning Modules

To further expand access to the COVID-19 Preparedness & Response curriculum developed with Brown University, Project HOPE partnered with DisasterReady to convert the content into a free online self-administered eLearning curriculum that includes all the same modules and information for people to view on their own devices. Since the eLearning platform launched at the end of June 2020, more than 3,800 participants from 157 countries and territories have engaged in COVID-19 eLearning modules, which are available in English and Spanish.

 

How you can help

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