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Independent Advisory Committee meetings

May 12-14, Seattle, USA

The GBD Independent Advisory Committee Spring (IAC) Spring 2025 meeting had a number of notable absences from the membership (for different unavoidable reasons) so it was a smaller group in attendance. The IAC members (with the exception of Peter Piot and Mike Klag) joined the meeting online, with Gates Foundation and IHME colleagues meeting in-person in at IHME’s Seattle offices. 

  1. The IAC group agreed that the online format of the meeting greatly limited the opportunities for free flowing discussions amongst the IAC members and with IHME staff members both during and in-between the meeting sessions. In order to accommodate time differences, the meeting agenda was also much shorter than a typical meeting. Whilst this format significantly reduced the travel budget and carbon footprint of the IAC, the IAC agreed that in-person meetings are far more productive and should be the modus operandi for the future.
  2. The IAC commends IHME for sharing their pre-reads and questions ahead of time and welcomed the new graphics and presentation format. All of IHME’s presentations were succinct and clear and provided the right level of technical detail for the discussions.
  3. The IAC continues to query the value of annual GBD updates, at least for policy decision making purposes, and recommends that the core GBD updates could be done every 2 or 3 years. The IAC is cognizant of the potential barriers to shifting to such a production cycle and suggests discussing this issue further with the IHME to explore whether these barriers can be effectively mitigated.
  4. The IAC recommends IHME now drills down a little further on the reported media and social media coverage in English – exploring which countries and regions specifically this coverage is coming from. It would also be interesting to explore what drives the high social media coverage in Japan as useful lessons could be drawn from that.
  5. On the population density work, the IAC felt that this was a highly original contribution and applauds IHME on this work. The IAC recommends that IHME continues to “ground truth” the population density work. This work fills in estimates where the data don’t exist but it would be useful to see where the estimates overlap with places where the data (e.g. census data) exist to see how the estimates hold up. 
  6. On the impact of climate change on health, the IAC notes the discrepancy with IPCC projections (due to the methods used to project GDP) and recommends a careful communication strategy around the presentation of these results.
  7. The IAC encourages IHME to continue to pursue its collaboration with WHO especially in light of the new structure and work plan.

Collaborator network

  1. On the GBD collaborations and partnerships – the IAC applauds the recent initiatives including the virtual and in-person event series, the targeted outreach to areas where there have been lower levels of collaboration and the development of the new regional centers, as seen in Singapore (with NUS) and the resulting the ASEAN paper series. The IAC strongly encourages the continuation of this work which could serve as a model for similar partnerships/regional centers.
    1. The IAC raised the question over how IHME might now better leverage the collaborators network to get more of the collaborators’ expertise and insights into the core GBD research work and also continue to monitor the quality and added value of each collaborator, given the very large number of them.
  2. The IAC also suggests that more could be done to properly structure and facilitate real “collaborator to collaborator” communication channels or networks.
  3. The IAC notes that a question remains over where and how GBD is being used for policy making. The IAC notes that it would be useful to build on the Midterm Review recommendations and look into this issue further (and looking beyond tracking GBD media coverage and references in policy and government documents). The IAC recognizes that real policy use and impact can be hard to track or measure quantitatively but examples such as the one cited in the meeting with the UK’s Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England) was a powerful example of how decision makers and practitioners are clearly using GBD in their work. 
  4. The IAC recommends cataloguing specific case studies on GBD policy use and impact. (This could also be more nuanced and granular and include for example how GBD is used to get certain issues onto the political agenda in countries or impacts what is being implemented and monitored in countries).

Health financing

  1. On the question of IHME tracking the declines to DAH and funding for major health initiatives, the IAC was very supportive of this valuable work and recommends working with several different hypotheses or assumptions on the continuing declines  (e.g. a decline of 20%, 40%, 60% etc).
  2. The IAC recommends that IHME publishes the frontier analysis work they have on looking at the attribution of investment/spend to health outcomes in different settings, countries/regions, especially for indicators such as child mortality and HIV. (The attributable impact may changes enormously by country and region).

Subnational estimation

  1. The IAC agreed that a core strategic goal for GBD is that subnational estimates should be increasingly done within countries and that IHME’s long term role should be to be more normative (i.e to provide a clear standardized methodology), technical support, and quality assurance and focus more on the global picture and the comparative analysis
  2. The IAC noted that as subnational estimates improve, so too will the entire GBD enterprise. 
  3. The collaborator-led modelling with OneMod Subnational was seen by the IAC as a major breakthrough and a “sea change” for GBD. The IAC agreed that it will be useful to see how partners start to engage and use it. Capturing their feedback and early responses will be both highly valuable.
  4. The IAC recommends a careful and slow roll out of the OneMod Subnational work.  The IAC recommends that IHME works closely and strategically with some specific and targeted groups in the initial roll out phase and develop a strategy to deal with possible abuse and poor use of OneMod.
  5. The IAC emphasizes the need to have a near and long term strategy for this work. (This work is still in the “proof of concept” phase). 
  6. The Committee recommends exploring AI tools for developing trainings for the roll out of OneMod Subnational as this could allow for a really effective and less labor intensive scale up of the trainings. IHME may also consider delivering training via regional hubs, not necessarily from Seattle.

Data quality

  1. On the issue of data quality: IHME presented a newly developed method for tracking and reporting the availability and relative importance of data for health metrics. The IAC was very pleased to see this work as it has called for this analysis for some time. IAC would like to revisit this foundational work in the near future.
  2. The IAC would like IHME to explore how to standardize the reporting on data quality (e.g. the development of a report card or a protocol would be really helpful.)
  3. The IAC recommended making this analysis possible at a more granular (i.e. country) level as this could become a very powerful advocacy tool to try to push for more investment in national level data systems.
  4. The IAC recommends that data quality work doesn’t need to necessarily review all of the data that they use for GBD. Rather it is more important to review the data sources which are most dependent and that might be difficult to replicate if the data source was no longer available (noting the recent changes with the DHS etc and that data sources are an increasingly dynamic situation).
  5. The IAC is curious to see if it is possible to incorporate this work into the GBD estimates somehow (in terms of showing confidence – not in a statistical sense – like a star rating system).

AI

  1. The IAC was pleased to see the different areas where IHME is already deploying and experimenting with AI (e.g. reviewing collaborators comments to papers). IAC would like to see a metric of success for tracking IHME’s AI adoption/implementation over time. 
  2. The IAC suggests that IHME could in the future serve as a calibrator or benchmark for other new startups/groups that could be entering the health estimate space using AI.
  3. As IHME is exploring the AI space the IAC recommends that they should place a strong emphasis on building new partnerships (as well as leveraging the existing collaborator network) as this can help to bring core AI expertise into the GBD work.
  4. If IHME is to really embrace alternative sources of data (for example search engine data and clinical notes) into the GBD estimation process (as the IAC have recommended), the IAC notes that this might require alternative analytical approaches and this is where these new partnerships will be especially critical. Leveraging the network is essential as local partners will also better understand local data.
  5. The IAC recommends the introduction of AI residency in IHME. The resident could be supervised by an external mentor (possibly a high-level AI expert from the tech world) and an internal mentor (a GBD expert from within IHME) for day-to-day supervision. 
  6. AI models need data to be trained on and IHME is data rich. Training AI models with partners with invaluable insights in local data sources and nuances deepens partnerships and provides mutual benefits to IHME and participating partners.
  7. With the prospect of increasing demand for alternative data sources for disease burden estimation, the IAC recommends that IHME develops a general framework to incentivize partners to come up with their own protocols for sharing different types of data that may inform burden estimation.
     

The next IAC meeting will take place from October 1-3, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan.

Past meetings