$100 Million Data Effort Aims to Improve Health Care in Poor Countries

The Rockefeller Foundation and a group of international public health organizations will put $100 million behind an effort to give health care workers in the developing world access to data that could help them make better treatment decisions.

Rockefeller has committed $60 million to the effort, called the Precision Public Health Initiative. The other participants include: Unicef; the World Health Organization; the Global Fund; the Global Financing Facility (which is supported by the World Bank Group); and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

The money initially will go toward the reduction of maternal and child mortality in India and Uganda. Rockefeller expects to work in eight additional countries in the next decade.

Precision health tries to predict where health problems might occur by using cloud computing and artificial intelligence to comb through and share data about things like migratory patterns, the weather, and social-media traffic, explains Naveen Rao, who leads health programs at Rockefeller. He predicts that integrating different data sets and developing predictive models based on that information could prevent 6 million deaths by 2030.

Rao compared the approach to farmers’ use of weather forecasting and market data to determine which seeds to plant to boost a crop’s yield.

“We’re trying to bring the equivalent of a weather-forecasting app into the hands of a frontline health-care worker,” he says.

Alex Daniels covers foundations, donor-advised funds, fundraising research, and tax issues for the Chronicle. He recently conducted interviews with the MacArthur Foundation’s Julia Stasch , who is stepping down after five years as president, and Unicef’s Caryl Stern, who has been tapped to lead the Walton Family Foundation . Email Alex or follow him on Twitter .