The Gates Grand Challenges Population Health Metrics Research Consortium Project (PHMRC) is an extensive research endeavor to improve population health metrics, tools, and methodologies. The goals for this research project developed from a critical need in global health for valid, reliable, and comparable population health information.

The project pursues a creative and bold approach by wedding epidemiology, biomedical research, and population health assessment. This approach will produce instruments that are science-based, standardized, and widely-applicable across different resource-poor settings. With these instruments, policymakers and researchers together will be able to help address persistent inequities in health outcomes that are problems for both the developed and the developing world.

This project has been funded through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative. It is one of 43 projects funded to undertake groundbreaking work that could lead to dramatic improvements in global health. More information can be found at the Initiative's website.

Objectives: In practice, the strengths of the various collaborators will be leveraged to achieve four inter-related objectives. Through joint data collection and analysis for populations in diverse resource-poor settings the Project will develop methods to measure the following:

-        Measuring Mortality - Mortality where vital registration systems are incomplete.

-         Cause of Death Attribution - Cause-specific mortality in populations with incomplete or inadequate cause-of-death coding.

-        Prevalence and Incidence of Disease - Measure the prevalence and incidence of major infectious diseases using interviews and serum collected in household surveys.

-        Measuring Effective Delivery of Priority Interventions - The effective delivery of antiretrovirals (ARVs) and childhood immunization to individuals who will benefit from them.