Evidence & Impact
Healthcare is changing rapidly. Digital technologies, artificial intelligence and increasingly rich health data offer new opportunities to understand disease and improve care. But technology alone does not improve health. What matters is whether we can turn better evidence into better decisions, better care and better outcomes for patients and populations.
Better Evidence.
Generating, evaluating and sharing evidence that can improve healthcare.
Better Decisions.
Helping healthcare providers and health systems use evidence, measurement and innovation to make better decisions.
Better Health.
Translating better decisions into safer, higher-quality and more effective healthcare.
What should we measure?
Patient outcomes:
What changes in health and functioning?
Patient experience:
What do patients report and experience?
Safety and quality:
Does the approach reduce risk and improve quality of care?
Health-system outcomes:
Does it improve how care is delivered and how systems perform?
GHDIF supports the development and evaluation of instruments and measures that make these questions answerable.
From evidence to practice
Measure: Develop and apply meaningful measures of outcomes, experience, safety and quality.
Evaluate: Generate evidence from research, clinical practice and real-world implementation.
Learn: Enable healthcare providers and health systems to use what they learn to improve care.
What guides our work
Patient Safety:
We focus on approaches that can help prevent harm and improve the safety and quality of care.
Learning Health Systems:
We support approaches that enable healthcare systems to learn from evidence, clinical practice and patient experience and continuously improve care.
Bridging the ecosystem
Addressing health challenges where evidence and innovation are missing
GHDIF develops and enables access to evidence-based instruments (e.g. PROs/COAs), technologies (e.g. digital biomarkers) and capabilities (including AI and machine learning) that enable healthcare providers to measure, evaluate and improve the quality, effectiveness and outcomes of care.
Modern healthcare increasingly relies on complex medicines, combinations of therapies and personalised treatment pathways. These advances can deliver substantial benefits, but they also create new challenges for patient safety. Treatment-related toxicities and adverse effects can vary substantially between individuals, evolve over time and interact with other treatments and patient characteristics.
The challenge is therefore not simply to develop better treatments, but to ensure that healthcare systems can identify, measure, understand and respond to the effects of those treatments throughout the patient's journey.
Yet there is often a gap between the emergence of a health challenge and the availability of a commercially viable solution.
The Gap We Address
Important health challenges do not always have a natural commercial solution. The evidence, measurement instruments, methods and capabilities needed to address an emerging problem may not yet be sufficiently aligned with a pharmaceutical programme, commercially attractive to a CRO, investable for a venture investor, or adequately resourced within healthcare systems.
GHDIF can work in this space where there is a clear public health benefit. As an independent non-profit organisation, we can support the development and evaluation of evidence-based instruments, technologies and capabilities even where there is not yet a viable commercial business case.
Cardio-oncology: an example
Cardio-oncology illustrates this broader patient-safety challenge. Modern cancer treatment can involve complex and evolving therapeutic pathways, while cardiovascular effects associated with treatment can vary between patients and develop over time. There is therefore a need for better ways to identify, measure and understand treatment-related cardiac burden throughout care.
Pharma may have limited incentive to develop such an approach unless it advances a particular therapeutic programme. A CRO generally requires a commercial client. A venture investor requires a credible path to a scalable commercial proposition. A healthcare provider may recognise the need but lack the resources to develop the necessary instrument or methodology.
GHDIF can address the gap because the immediate objective is not commercialisation: it is generating the evidence, instruments and capability needed to improve patient safety and healthcare outcomes.
From evidence to public benefit
The purpose of better evidence is better healthcare.
GHDIF works to ensure that knowledge, instruments, technologies and capabilities developed through its work can contribute to safer, more effective and continuously improving healthcare.
Global health challenges → Evidence → Healthcare providers → Better care → Patients & populations