These five principles guide everything IHME does.
1. Scientific Excellence: Because everyone deserves to live a long life in full health, better evidence of what works and what doesn’t is needed to help society achieve this goal. Sound evidence must come from rigorous measurement and adhere to the principles of scientific inquiry. To that end, above all else, we pursue excellence in scientific advancement aimed at improving population health.
2. Policy Relevance: We will measure what is important for guiding health policy, not just what is easy to measure. To better guide health policy, we make our findings comparable across time and populations using the most recent data available, and we provide information at the most local area of measurement possible.
3. Impartiality: For health evidence to be useful, it also must be credible, generated by a scientific process unimpeded by political, financial, or other types of interference. IHME was created to fill a gap in global health: to separate the measurement and evaluation of health policies and programs from the process of creating, implementing, and advocating for policies and programs.
4. Collaboration: To help people live longer lives in better health worldwide, we work with a broad network of researchers, statisticians, and policymakers, following a science-based, collaborative approach. We also foster a transparent and constructive dialogue and debate about all aspects of health measurement.
5. Knowledge Sharing: Because health improvement often starts from within communities, we invite the public to help us interpret our results and advance health metrics and evaluation through reports, policy discussions, data visualizations, and other activities. We also believe it is crucial to cultivate the next generation of leaders in health metrics and evaluation through educational programs, trainings, and mentoring.