Health Research

Our health research program is a quality improvement tool used to enhance our knowledge about the human health. It aims at exploring better ways to prevent and treat disease with the ultimate goal of improving standards of care as well as evaluate the effectiveness and outcomes of the “health care system” on people’s health. In a nutshell our health researchers investigate five major aspects of health care: access to care, the quality of the care, effectiveness of health interventions, the health behavior of population and the cost of care.

Like privacy, health research has high value to society. It provides important information about
disease trends and risk factors, outcomes of treatment or public health interventions, functional abilities, patterns of care, and health care costs and use. In addition to individual benefits of improved health, economists have found that health research can have an enormous impact on human wellbeing and longevity. This results in increased productivity of the population and a vibrant national economy. It must be noted that if the research enterprise is impeded or if it is less robust, important societal interests are affected.

Improving health is central to the Millennium Development Goals. Unfortunately, in many
developing countries the public sector is responsible for providing health care. The increasing
pressure and overwhelming demand for health services in underserved regions of the world, calls for collaboration between public and private sectors to adequately meet the demands of the population. Having a shared vision with key stakeholders in the private sector is only part of the solution since areas of need or deficiency must be identified using bias free and reliable data. Storage and maintenance of medical records remain challenging due to limited use of information technology such as electronic health records. Patients are required to keep and present records of previous encounters with providers during clinic visits and hospitalization.

As we strive to improve the health of populations at risk, we are committed to implement the use of user friendly and cost effective information technology to facilitate research and development. We believe that in order to win the war against disease, disability and premature death we must focus on efforts to have a better understanding of human health while implementing evidence-based clinical practices. Research findings are known to positively influence organizational structure, improve the practice of medicine and policy decisions at local, national and international levels. This makes health research the foundation of our work to improve the health of people living in underserved communities around the world.