Assembling GHERG: Could “academic crowd–sourcing” address gaps in global health estimates?

In recent months, the World Health Organization (WHO), independent academic researchers, the Lancet and PLoS Medicine journals worked together to improve reporting of population health estimates. The new guidelines for accurate and transparent health estimates reporting (likely to be named GATHER), which are eagerly awaited, represent a helpful move that should benefit the field of global health metrics. Building on this progress and drawing from a tradition of Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group (CHERG)’s successful work model, we would like to propose a new initiative – “Global Health Epidemiology Reference Group” (GHERG). We see GHERG as an informal and entirely voluntary international collaboration of academic groups who are willing to contribute to improving disease burden estimates and respect the principles of the new guidelines – a form of “academic crowd–sourcing”. The main focus of GHERG will be to identify the “gap areas” where not much information is available and/or where there is a lot of uncertainty present about the accuracy of the existing estimates. This approach should serve to complement the existing WHO and IHME estimates and to represent added value to both efforts.