Partnerships
To achieve its aims, the IDEA Initiative housed in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health works in partnership with several initiatives, global networks and projects, both across the campus and beyond.
Johns Hopkins Alliance for a Healthier World—Transformative Technologies and Institutions
The Johns Hopkins Alliance for a Healthier World is a University-wide signature initiative that integrates expertise and diverse perspectives from across schools and disciplines to unlock groundbreaking knowledge addressing unresolved global health challenges. The Alliance stimulates and supports innovation around healthy equity via multidisciplinary events, funding grants, mentorship, and strategic communication that bring the Hopkins community together.
Specifically, the Transformative Technologies and Institutions arm of the Alliance works to:
Develop a policy and research framework for discovering, developing, and delivering transformative technologies to improve the health and health care of populations, particularly the disadvantaged;
Apply systems thinking to create an enabling environment to support how transformative technologies and institutions might overcome failures of the market and reduce health inequities; and
Position the University through its research and education mission to help harness potentially transformative technologies and institutions to make health systems more equitable.
Working with Global Health Equity Scholars, the work has focused on supporting open access and open science efforts (in partnership with the Sheridan and Welch Libraries), engaging students on these issues (e.g., 2018 MedHacks track on “Open Science to Advance Health Equity”), and working with faculty to address these challenges (e.g., approaches to bring low-cost diagnostics to resource-limited settings). Advisory input from a University-wide Technology Product Lifecycle Committee helps to inform the direction of TTI’s efforts.
Antibiotic Resistance Coalition
The ReAct Strategic Policy Program also serves as the Secretariat for the Antibiotic Resistance Coalition. Founded in 2014, the Antibiotic Research Coalition, or ARC, consists of civil society organizations and stakeholders from six continents working to advocate for policy change and action to prevent the post-antibiotic era from becoming a bleak reality. Its over 25 members share a commitment to the principles of the Antibiotic Resistance Declaration. ARC has played an active role in advancing efforts to address antimicrobial resistance and safeguarding the public’s interest in the policy process through joint position statements, strategy convenings of civil society, a monthly newsletter for policymakers as well as consultations and briefings with intergovernmental agencies.
In addition to the initiatives above, the IDEA Initiative collaborates closely with organizations and initiatives across Johns Hopkins University and around the world. Below are a few examples--past and present.
The Leaders Enabling Access to Pharmaceuticals (LEAP) workshop trains students and physicians-in-training on becoming effective voices for the public’s interest on pharmaceutical policy, particularly high drug prices. In 2019, the workshop was co-organized with Public Citizen, with co-sponsorship by the American Medical Student Association. Representatives of various public interest groups, including U.S. PIRG, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Knowledge Ecology International, and Doctors for America among others, contributed to the training.
With ReAct support, a 2017 workshop on “The Societal Role of Physicians in Meeting the Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance” was organized for the Junior Doctors Network meeting in Chicago and in support of their efforts to revisit the World Medical Association’s position statement on AMR. Speakers also included representatives from Consumers Union, Food Animal Concerns Trust, the Natural Resources Defense Council, US PIRG and its Health Professionals Action Network. This was in lead up to the WMA’s adoption of an updated position statement in October 2019.
The Antibiotic Resistance Coalition, comprised of over 25 members, convened “Charting a Civil Society Agenda on Antimicrobial Resistance: Connecting Global to Local” in Geneva, Switzerland. Working together with South Centre and the Third World Network, ReAct’s Strategic Policy Program organized the three-day, civil society strategy session, along with the fifth annual WHO-NGO Dialogue.
With the International Federation of Medical Student Associations (IFMSA), colleagues in ReAct, and partners at the South Centre, the IDEA Initiative organized Innovate4AMR, a global student design competition focused on developing innovative approaches to address antimicrobial stewardship in resource-limited settings. The World Health Organization provided critical support for the hosting of a three-day, capacity-building workshop for ten winning teams from thirteen countries.
The IDEA Initiative worked with the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda to develop a health policy and political economy course for its part-time Master of Science in Global Health Delivery in 2017 and 2018 classes.
