Dear Meena and HIFA Colleagues,
Thanks to Meena for highlighting the WHO webinar on 12 May 2026, participated in a very interesting interactive Webinar on ‘Informal mobile phone use in the health services: maximizing the benefits and minimize the challenges’.
Several HIFA members participated, including Meena, Geoff (Royston) and myself.
HIFA has been closely involved with this research project for several years.
Here is what Claire Glenton, principal invesigator, had to say: “HIFA has been a vital part of the mHealth-Innovate research project as it has given us a unique opportunity to discuss topics with healthcare workers, managers and policy makers from across the world. This has been a great supplement to our more formal research processes as these are often slow, shaped by the researcher and limited to specific settings. The HIFA network, on the other hand, is an open space where people from all levels of the system can discuss topics on their own terms. HIFA has helped us put our questions on the agenda and the HIFA discussions have been a key part of making sure that our research is relevant for people on the ground. This is not the first time we have collaborated with HIFA and hopefully not the last!” Claire Glenton, Principal Investigator, February 2025 https://www.hifa.org/hifa-projects
I would like to flag that HIFA is ready and waiting to collaborate with other research projects. We now have considerable expertise and experience in this type of work. And we are highly cost-effective: our services to the above project, for example, average at just £2000 per year. Most importantly, sponsored projects are by far our most important way to bring income to sustain HIFA's general operations: forums, projects, advocacy and WHO collaboration. Projects account for more than two-thirds of our total income. Lastly, projects are great because they provide a time-limited focus of HIFA members to share their experience on a specific topic, knowing that their contributions will be considered as part of the broader research initiative, including inputs and joint authorship of peer-reviewed papers.
We are open to collaborate with any new research projects. Our work is well-suited to health systems research in general, and especially to research relating to quality of care, patient safety and knowledge translation.
To read more about HIFA projects, see: https://www.hifa.org/hifa-projects
For more on the above project see: https://www.hifa.org/projects/mhealth-innovate-what-can-we-learn-health-...
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org