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In conjunction with the Pacific Health Summit, CHA coordinates a number of health policy labs as a second stream of timely and topical research and meetings responsive to the demand by key organizations and decision-makers. We have been successful with the Health Information Technology and Policy Lab (HIT), Personal Health Lab, and Emerging Infections and Pandemic Lab. For example, the HIT lab has organized meetings in Washington, DC, Tokyo, Singapore, and Mumbai and has produced a series of national and topical case studies on HIT that has become a unique source of “best practice” in global HIT. CHA co-hosted the Beijing Workshop with the Chinese CDC as part of the Emerging Infections and Pandemic Lab.
 Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, at Summit 2007 | CHA’s signature program is the Pacific Health Summit—an event of growing significance in global health—which it administers in partnership with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Every June the Pacific Health Summit welcomes 250 of the best minds in science, industry, and health policy to discuss how we can build a global health model that will prevent, detect, and treat disease early enough to keep people healthy and dramatically reduce the human and financial cost of disease. Eighteen economies were represented at Summit 2006. |
Each year the Pacific Health Summit focuses on a single theme designed to tackle an important problem in global health. In June 2008, the Summit will highlight the topic of Nutrition—and the two-front war of under-nutrition and its impact on vulnerable populations and the emerging threat of over-nutrition to the world’s health. The 2007 Summit dealt with the theme of “Pandemics: Working Together for an Effective and Equitable Response.”
The Pacific Health Summit is a catalyst for high-level policy decisions and a venue where important announcements are made. At the 2007 Summit, the World Health Organization announced that it would create a global stockpile of vaccines for the H5N1 virus and the private sector announced that it would donate 50 million doses of pre-pandemic influenza vaccine to help establish the WHO stockpile. In addition to the June meeting, the Summit provides an ongoing forum for world leaders to improve health by working together to grapple with problems and solutions, share best practices, and forge effective collaborations. Toward this end, the NBR Center for Health and Aging manages a series of “Health Policy Labs” that focus on particular areas of interest, such as health information technology, early health, and pandemics.
Learn more by visiting the Pacific Health Summit website.
 | The goal of the Early Health Lab is to promote the prevention, early detection, and early treatment of disease. Diagnosing disease in its earliest possible stages, when there can be many treatment options, leads to better health outcomes and lower costs. The primary focus of this Lab is the Early Health Initiative (EHI). The EHI seeks to identify and assimilate a broad array of quantitative and qualitative data to provide an overall map of how the participating countries of the Pacific Health Summit are doing in terms of implementing the basic elements of early health. Other emphases include personal health and the integration of Eastern and Western approaches to health and medicine. |
 | The Health Information Technology and Policy (HIT) Lab examines the national and international public policy framework surrounding public health, science, and technology, with the goal of improving the environment for the adoption of information technologies that can improve health outcomes. |
After a launch meeting in Washington, D.C. in January 2006, the Lab convened participants in April of that same year at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, where 47 participants from seven economies gathered over a day and a half of active discussions to identify the needs of healthcare systems around the globe and areas where IT and other technologies can help address current challenges. The HIT Lab held its third workshop in November 2006 in Singapore to discuss how to use health technology to scale healthcare for resource-poor settings, featuring case studies of unique successes and challenges from 10 economies.
In 2007, the lab convened 30 participants in Mumbai to explore how disruptive information technologies could help scale healthcare in India’s rural areas,
For more information on the HIT Lab, please visit: http://pacifichealthsummit.org/initiatives/hitlab/default.aspx
 | The goal of the Emerging Infections/Pandemics Lab is to contribute research and support to saving lives and minimizing the economic impact of emerging infections and pandemic disease outbreaks. In 2007, our focus is on pandemic prevention and preparedness for avian influenza. |
In keeping with this focus, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the NBR Center for Health and Aging hosted the “Pandemic Influenza Vaccines Workshop: Building a Platform for Global Collaboration” on January 28-30, 2007 in Beijing. Participants discussed how to build a model for global collaboration on pandemic influenza vaccine research, development, manufacturing, regulation. Our efforts to create new research and policy platforms build on problem-solving aimed at the following issues:
For more information on this workshop, please visit: http://pacifichealthsummit.org/initiatives/eiplab/pandemic_flu.aspx
The Emerging Infections/Pandemic Lab also compiled a public archive of background research, a calendar of related events, and policy and industry resources on pandemic influenza vaccines, which can be accessed through the following link: http://pacifichealthsummit.org/initiatives/eiplab/pandvaxresource.aspx
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