The roles of Health Information and Health Informatics vary tremendously in different developing countries of the world. Some have comprehensive systems in place while many are just beginning to examine the potential of these functions to help solve their many intractable health problems. An overview of the scope and extent of health problems that more comprehensive health information systems could help address will be presented. Application of local and indigenous knowledge in these efforts and appropriate education and capacity building are both crucial to the success of attempts to improve the situation. Some examples will be given to illustrate both the scope of the problem and the potential significant improvements in human health that such efforts can produce.

 

There will be no “one solution” that will apply globally; one of the major challenges will be to ensure that any efforts take advantage of best practices from others while ensuring that local economic, technological, legal, social, cultural and gender issues are addressed. Another challenge will be will be to target sufficient funds from new or ongoing projects to incorporate appropriate and sustainable health informatics components. This challenge is not limited to the developing countries.

 

Colin Mayfield is a Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Waterloo and the Assistant Director of the United Nations University - International Network on Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) based at McMaster University. He graduated from the University of Liverpool in England with degrees in botany and microbiology and has been at Waterloo since 1970. He served as the Associate Dean of Computing in the Faculty of Science and has been involved in research in soil and water microbiology, toxicology and, in the last 15 years, in developing environmental information systems in many different countries. At UNU-INWEH his primary responsibility is in information systems development and capacity building efforts around the world.