Topic: Projects and Initiatives

CrisisReady is an international research-response platform based at Harvard University and Direct Relief. Co-led by Caroline Buckee, Satchit Balsari, and Andrew Schroeder, the platform’s Data-Methods-Translational Framework allows the CrisisReady team to scale data-driven decision making through a network of regional partners.

The IDHN White Papers are an ongoing series of publications that respond to India’s evolving digital health ecosystem architecture and data protection laws. Our papers have helped shape the patient-centric federated API-enabled architecture of India’s evolving digital health platforms.

For this project, we analyzed over one million patient visits to the underground hospitals supported by the Syrian American Medical Society, to establish the epidemiology of presenting complaints and availability of health services through the progression of the war.

Our team at the India Digital Health Net is studying the Indian ministry of health’s non-communicable disease screening and management digital tool, targeting 100 million households, to optimize design choices to improve physician and patient uptake and satisfaction.

We surveyed 1000 households to establish the impact of “formal” refugee status on education, jobs, identity and a sense of belonging among the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

The COVID-19 Mobility Data Network (CMDN) is a network of infectious disease epidemiologists at universities around the world working with technology companies to use aggregated mobility data to support the COVID-19 response. The goal of the CMDN is to provide daily updates to decision makers at the state and local levels on how well social distancing interventions are working, using anonymized, aggregated data sets from mobile devices, along with analytic support for interpretation.

The Kumbh Mela is the world’s largest mass gathering, where tens of millions congregate at one of four holy sites in India during a several week-long festival. The government builds an ephemeral city — replete with roads, sanitation, and power — in which religious groups and small business provide food, shelter, sermons, and entertainment for the visiting pilgrims. In 2013, Harvard University sent a multi-disciplinary research team of faculty and students with backgrounds in theology, urban planning, public health, and business to study the world’s largest mass gathering.