July 2007: The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) launches with the goal of providing an impartial, evidence-based picture of global health trends to inform the work of policymakers, researchers, and funders. Main supporters are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the state of Washington.
September 2008: First Post-Graduate Fellows arrive at IHME. Fellows have since come from numerous countries, including Kenya, Nepal, and Brazil. Past fellows continue their public health work in positions including research associate at the Japanese International Cooperation Agency's Research Institute, professor of community medicine in Sri Lanka, and senior technical advisor to Botswana’s ministry of health.
December 2008: IHME’s assessment of diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccination programs is published in The Lancet, challenging accepted numbers and paving the way for new approaches to track the effectiveness of such programs.
April 2009: IHME releases initial work on risk factors in PLOS Medicine. Included are estimates of the impact of risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, high blood sugar, and overweight/obesity in the US.
July 2009: First Financing Global Health (FGH) report is published, tracking more than $200 billion in public and private contributions to public health. Annual updates to FGH are produced in following years.
September 2009: The Health Metrics and Evaluation track of the Master of Public Health program is offered for the first time through the University of Washington’s School of Public Health.
April 2010: “Maternal mortality for 181 countries, 1980-2008: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5” is published in The Lancet, changing the conversation about maternal mortality. The New York Times features the study in a front-page article, Maternal Deaths Decline Sharply Across the Globe. To illustrate the maternal mortality trends, IHME produces its first data visualizations.
June 2010: IHME’s first Post-Bachelor Fellowship cohort graduates from the Master of Public Health program at the University of Washington. Since then, this has become one of the most sought-after fellowships in the country, attracting hundreds of applicants each year.
March 2011: The Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx) is launched at the Global Health Metrics and Evaluation conference, creating the world’s most comprehensive catalog of surveys, censuses, vital statistics, and other health-related data.
June 2011: IHME’s initial US county-level life expectancy work is published in Population Health Metrics, showing that the US is falling behind other countries.
October 2011: The results of IHME’s assessment of Avahan, an HIV-prevention program in India, appear in The Lancet.
May 2012: IHME begins an innovative, multiyear collaboration with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to create an integrated tracking system that will monitor health and inform health policy priorities.
September 2012: First cohort of students begin PhD program in Global Health: Metrics and Implementation Science through the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington, while also working as research assistants at IHME.
December 2012: The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010 (GBD 2010), covering the years 1990 to 2010, is published in The Lancet, the first time the journal has dedicated an entire triple issue to one study. A collaborative effort of 488 researchers from 303 institutions in 50 countries, GBD 2010 covers 187 countries, 20 age groups, 21 regions, 291 diseases and injuries, and 67 risk factors.
March 2013: Country-specific findings from GBD 2010 are released, detailing changes in health between 1990 and 2010 and main risk factors in each of 187 countries.
June 2013: Following a productive policy summit in China, IHME begins a collaboration with Chinese health officials to measure the burden of disease in provinces throughout the country.
July 2013: Policy report “The State of US Health: Innovations, Insights, and Recommendations from the Global Burden of Disease Study” is released at a White House event with First Lady Michelle Obama.
September 2013: In a collaboration with the World Bank, IHME produces six regional GBD reports, introduced by IHME Director Christopher Murray at an event at the Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC. This marks the 20th anniversary of the original disease burden work.
November 2013: The Roux Prize is launched to reward use of Global Burden of Disease evidence to improve health.
January 2014: First installment of GBD 2013, “Smoking Prevalence and Cigarette Consumption in 187 Countries, 1980-2012,” is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Further GBD updates are released throughout the year.
August 2014: Dr. Christopher Murray presents findings from the paper “Global, regional, and national incidence and mortality for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria during 1990–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013” at a symposium at the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne. He is joined by Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS; Deborah Birx, United States Global AIDS coordinator; and Mark Dybul, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; with Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, as moderator.
September 2014: Dr. Rodrigo Guerrero, mayor of Cali, Colombia, wins the inaugural Roux Prize for using data to address violence as a public health crisis.
October 2014: The University of Washington Center for Health Trends and Forecasts is established at IHME. Funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), the new Center joins 11 NIA Demography Centers at leading universities and policy organizations around the United States.
December 2014: Country-specific cause-of-death data from the Global Burden of Disease enterprise are published in The Lancet, showing that life expectancy has increased worldwide since 1990 as death rates from infectious diseases and cardiovascular disease have fallen.
April 2015: Epic Measures: One Doctor, Seven Billion Patients is published by Harper Wave. Written by journalist Jeremy N. Smith, the book chronicles the Global Burden of Disease enterprise’s development, from Director Christopher Murray’s early interest in population health to the first few years of IHME’s existence.
May 2015: IHME and the World Health Organization sign a landmark agreement to improve data used to generate estimates of levels and trends in health.
July 2015: The Lives Saved Scorecard shows that from 2000 to 2014, countries and donors spent a combined $207 billion on children’s health – and saved the lives of 34 million children.
October 2015: A subnational disease burden initiative is launched in India through a collaboration between IHME, the Indian Council of Medical Research, and the Public Health Foundation of India, under the aegis of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India.
October 2015: The University of Washington Press publishes An Integrative Metaregression Framework for Descriptive Epidemiology, an in-depth explanation of the methods underlying the morbidity estimation in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study.
October 2015: Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, Minister of Health of Rwanda, is awarded the 2015 Roux Prize for using GBD data to improve Rwandan health. Among her achievements are initiatives to improve indoor air quality and combat neonatal deaths.
November 2015: IHME joins the newly formed Partners for Diagnosis and Treatment, a coalition created by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and led by the American Society of Clinical Pathology in order to improve cancer diagnostics and treatment in low-income countries.
September 2016: Dr. John Q. Wong wins the 2016 Roux Prize for expanding health insurance in the Philippines.
October 2016: The GBD 2015 study is published and introduces the expected burden of disease based on a population’s level of socioeconomic development – as measured by the Socio-demographic Index. GBD 2015 is also compliant with recommendations set forth by Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting (GATHER). Data visualizations for the study include 24 billion results.
October 2016: The University of Washington’s Population Health Initiative receives a $210 million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund construction of a new building to house several UW units working in population health, including IHME.
January 2017: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commits to investing $279 million in IHME to expand its work over the next decade.
May 2017: The article “Healthcare Access and Quality Index based on mortality from causes amenable to personal health care in 195 countries and territories, 1990–2015: a novel analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015” is published, showing massive inequity of access to and quality of health care among and within countries, and concluding that people are dying from causes with well-known treatments.
June 2017: IHME celebrates the 10th anniversary of its founding at the University of Washington.
September 2017: A census tract-level health analysis of Seattle and King County, a joint project between IHME and Public Health – Seattle & King County, reveals an 18-year gap in life expectancy between different parts of the county.
September 2017: GBD 2016 is published, including the second annual report on the Sustainable Development Goal indicators, with the participation of 2,518 collaborators from 133 countries and three territories. The study includes 333 diseases and injuries, 84 risk factors, and 23 age groups, estimated for a total of 774 locations.
September 2017: IHME hosts a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the GBD study. Highlights include keynote speeches by Bill Gates and World Bank Group President Jim Kim.
October 2017: The 2017 Roux Prize is awarded to Dr. Samba Sow, a Malian physician who generated and used metrics on the disease burden related to Hib – Haemophilus influenzae type b disease – to secure political and financial support to vaccinate thousands of children against the disease.
November 2017: The policy report India: Health of the Nation’s States is published. The product of a collaboration between IHME and the Indian Council of Medical Research, the report describes the distribution and trends of diseases and risk factors for every state of India from 1990 to 2016.
March 2018: Studies of child growth failure and educational attainment that map the entire African continent in 5 x 5 square kilometer units are published as the cover story in the journal Nature, expanding IHME’s Local Burden of Disease work.
March 2018: Professors Christopher Murray and Alan Lopez, the founders of the Global Burden of Disease Study, win the John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, which annually honors individuals in science whose pioneering work has shown “a significant impact on health outcomes in the developing world.”
April 2018: A Global Burden of Disease paper detailing the United States’ disease burden at the state level – the most comprehensive state-by-state health assessment ever undertaken – is published, revealing “dangerous disparities” among states.
May 2018: IHME and the World Health Organization sign a memorandum of understanding, agreeing to collaborate in improving the accuracy, timeliness, and policy-relevance of health data, including working together on the annual Global Burden of Disease study.
July 2018: The new Department of Health Metrics Sciences launches at the University of Washington School of Medicine, with Dr. Christopher Murray at its helm.
July 2018: IHME and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital begin a partnership to advance knowledge of childhood cancer worldwide.
August 2018: A new Global Burden of Disease report concludes there is no safe level of drinking alcohol and attributes nearly 3 million deaths, globally, in 2016 to alcohol use.
August 2018: The study “Global mortality from firearms, 1990–2016” is published, showing more than a quarter-million people died from firearm-related injuries in 2016, with half of those deaths occurring in only six countries in the Americas: Brazil, the US, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Guatemala.
September 2018: IHME releases the first-ever scientific study ranking countries for their levels of human capital. Findings highlight the need for countries to invest in their people’s education and health.
October 2018: The 2018 Roux Prize is awarded to Dr. Cynthia Maung, a Burmese physician and director of the Mae Tao Clinic in Thailand, for using health data to improve the lives of refugees, migrant workers, and internally displaced people along the Burmese-Thai border.
October 2018: IHME publishes its first-ever study of forecasts and alternative scenarios for life expectancy and major causes of death in 2040.
November 2018: GBD 2017 is published, producing for the first time the study’s own population and fertility estimates. Described in seven papers, the results cover mortality and life expectancy, causes of death and years of healthy life lost, years lived with disability, overall burden of disease, risk factors, and the chances of each nation meeting 41 of the health-related SDG indicators. This year’s study includes more than 38 billion estimates of 359 diseases and injuries and 84 risk factors in 195 countries and territories, and incorporates input from 3,676 collaborators from 146 countries and territories.