(This post was originally published on the K4Health Blog)

Three senior Obama administration officials on Wednesday spoke at a policy forum held at the Kaiser Family Foundation on the Administration’s Global Health Initiative (GHI) – a six-year $63 billion proposed effort that will build on existing “disease-specific” initiatives and increase attention to other areas such as family planning, reproductive health, and maternal and child health.

The forum featured three senior-level officials involved in the GHI, including Amie Batson, deputy assistant administrator for global health at USAID, Deborah Birx, director of the Global AIDS Program at CDC, and Ann Gavaghan, Chief of Staff of the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator. The speakers highlighted many points included in a policy brief released by KFF that provides an overview of the GHI, as well as issues that will shape the initiative’s direction and effectiveness in the years to come.

According to Gavaghan, the goal of the GHI is not to “take away from any of the successes [of past programs], but to say 'let's recognize what's been done.’” She added, "Let's recognize what's worked across the board, not only from the U.S. government but our partners in countries, our partners in multilateral organizations, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, and let's figure out a way to really build those best practices."

Birx – who talked about research and innovation, monitoring and evaluation, and improved metrics of global health programs – reiterated Gavaghan’s point, asking how the GHI and the global health community at large can come together to better measure, categorize and disseminate what innovation has been done, as well as what has worked at the community- or host-government levels and what has not.

Gavaghan and Birx highlight a very important question – how do we take our collective experience, manage it transparently, and learn from it to ultimately help the people who need our assistance the most? This question sits at the foundation of the K4Health project and drives much of our global and in-country activities.

As a neutral platform funded by USAID, K4Health provides global health organizations and working groups a space to build online toolkits. Our online Toolkit Application is based on a continuous publishing principle that ensures new information resources are collected and made accessible. This allows them to evolve after publication to capture additional resources and to identify and fill remaining information gaps, thus reducing duplication of effort. Toolkits developed using the application are housed and accessible on K4Health but can also be placed on organizations’ Web sites and uploaded to CD-ROM or flash drives for country use and adaptation.

As Birx noted, we want to build on our collective strengths so that we do not “learn and re-learn” what has been done. In support of this objective and the GHI, K4Health is here for the global health community to manage our wisdom, make it easy to find and use, and ensure valuable experience is not lost so future programs can work from the past to inform their design and increase their chances of success.

Chris Rottler, Senior Communication Manager