Gates Awards $279 Million to U. of Washington to Track Global Health

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today awarded its neighbor, the University of Washington, $279 million over 10 years to develop and maintain databases that measure health trends around the globe.

The university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation was created in 2007 after a $105 million grant from the Gates Foundation helped lure three Harvard researchers to the West Coast. Since then, its staff has grown to 300. The institute’s computers analyze data from 2,000 collaborating researchers from around the world. It’s hallmark effort, the Global Burden of Disease project, aims to quantify diseases, risk factors, and injuries in 130 countries.

Rather than study the health of individual patients or of people in batches of a few thousand, the institute’s goal is to track a large range of health indicators, such as the incidence of heart disease, malaria, and child mortality across huge populations. It’s a big-data approach to the study of health that can very quickly determine whether a medical intervention had a positive impact on entire countries.

Paul Ramsey, chief executive of UW Medicine, said the institute’s work can help give lawmakers and clinicians a clear view of the results of new vaccines and health policies. The new funding, he said, will help the institute forecast the results of specific medical interventions before a lot of money is spent on a new approach.

“I’ve been in medicine for 40 years, and I feel like I’ve been waiting the first four decades of my career for the types of improvements we can make in the next five or 10 years,” he said.

Since the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa severely tested the response of health organizations around the world, Gates has stepped up its support of projects that measure health indicators. For instance, in 2015 it committed $75 million to the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance network, designed to monitor disease outbreaks. And data collection is a key component of its six-year, $776 million effort to promote nutrition.