Background: In March 2009, the Task Force for Innovative International Financing for Health Systems recommended "a health systems funding platform for the Global Fund, GAVI Alliance, the World Bank and others to coordinate, mobilize, streamline and channel the flow of existing and new international resources to support national health strategies." Momentum to establish the Health Systems Funding Platform was swift, with the World Bank convening a Technical Workshop on Health Systems Strengthening (HSS), and serial meetings organized to progress the agenda. Despite its potential significance, there has been little comment in peer-reviewed literature, though some disquiet in the international development community around the scope of the Platform and the capacity of the partners, which appears disproportionate to the available information.

Methods: This case study uses documentary analysis, participant observation and 24 in-depth interviews to examine the processes of development and key issues raised by the Platform.

Results: The findings show a fluid and volatile process, with debate over whether ongoing engagement in HSS by Global Fund and GAVI represents a dilution of organizational focus, risking ongoing support, or a paradigm shift that facilitates the achievement of targeted objectives, builds systems capacity, and will attract additional resources. Uncertainty in the development of the Platform reflects the flexibility of the recently formed global health initiatives, and the instability of donor commitments, particularly in the current financial climate. But implicit in the conflict is tension between key global stakeholders over defining and ownership of the health systems agenda.

Conclusions: The tensions appear to have been resolved through a focus on national planning, applying International Health Partnership principles, though the global financial crisis and key personnel changes may yet alter outcomes. Despite its dynamic evolution, the Platform may offer an incremental path towards increasing integration around health systems, that has not been previously possible.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3117689PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1744-8603-7-16DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

health systems
28
systems funding
12
funding platform
12
health
10
global fund
8
fund gavi
8
systems
7
platform
6
global
5
platform thought
4

Similar Publications

Background: Patient portals, or secure websites linked to electronic medical records, have emerged as tools to provide patients with timely access to their health information. To support the potential benefits of patient portals such as improved engagement in health care, it is essential to understand how patients and caregivers experience these portals.

Objective: This study aimed to explore patient and caregiver experiences, facilitators, and barriers to accessing and using a patient portal called MyChart during the initial stages of its implementation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Efficient emergency patient transport systems, which are crucial for delivering timely medical care to individuals in critical situations, face certain challenges. To address this, CONNECT-AI (CONnected Network for EMS Comprehensive Technical-Support using Artificial Intelligence), a novel digital platform, was introduced. This artificial intelligence (AI)-based network provides comprehensive technical support for the real-time sharing of medical information at the prehospital stage.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Individuals with hearing impairments may face hindrances in health care assistance, which may significantly impact the prognosis and the incidence of complications and iatrogenic events. Therefore, the development of automatic communication systems to assist the interaction between this population and health care workers is paramount.

Objective: This study aims to systematically review the evidence on communication systems using human-computer interaction techniques developed for deaf people who communicate through sign language that are already in use or proposed for use in health care contexts and have been tested with human users or videos of human users.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Looking at the world often involves not just seeing things, but feeling things. Modern feedforward machine vision systems that learn to perceive the world in the absence of active physiology, deliberative thought, or any form of feedback that resembles human affective experience offer tools to demystify the relationship between seeing and feeling, and to assess how much of visually evoked affective experiences may be a straightforward function of representation learning over natural image statistics. In this work, we deploy a diverse sample of 180 state-of-the-art deep neural network models trained only on canonical computer vision tasks to predict human ratings of arousal, valence, and beauty for images from multiple categories (objects, faces, landscapes, art) across two datasets.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Fabry disease (FD) is a rare lysosomal storage disorder that is associated with pain and progressive damage to the renal, cardiac, and cerebrovascular systems. Enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) is one of the treatment options for FD and the most recently approved ERT agent, pegunigalsidase alfa, has shown clinical efficacy in three phase 3 clinical trials of adults with FD: BALANCE, BRIDGE, and BRIGHT. Recent published guidelines support the mapping of health utility state data to the EuroQol-5 Dimension-3 Level (EQ-5D-3L) index to align with the preferred methodology used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!