HIFA and the politics of reliable healthcare information

HIFA and the politics of reliable healthcare information | Photo: National Cancer Institute

Published on 21 April 2026 at 05:24 GMT

By Editorial Team SDG3

For all the attention paid to apps, video consultations and artificial intelligence in health care, HIFA, Healthcare Information For All, starts from a simpler proposition. No remote care system can be fair or effective unless people can access reliable healthcare information they can understand and use. That sounds elementary, yet it remains one of the least glamorous and least funded problems in global health. HIFA, a global campaign and community of practice with more than 20,000 members in 180 countries and more than 400 supporting organisations, has spent years arguing that the information gap is not peripheral to health systems. It is one of their hidden fault lines.

Founded around the idea of universal access to health information, HIFA brings together health workers, researchers, librarians, publishers, policymakers and patient advocates. Its stated aim is to improve the availability and use of trustworthy health information, while also protecting people from misinformation. That places it in a part of the health debate that often sits between categories, neither a frontline service provider nor a conventional research body, but a network trying to connect evidence, policy and practice. In 2022, the Global Healthcare Information Network CIC, the UK non-profit that administers HIFA, entered official relations with the World Health Organization, giving the organisation a more formal place in global health discussions.

The case for that work has been building for more than two decades. A 2004 Lancet paper asked whether health information for all could be achieved by 2015, arguing that universal access to information for health professionals was a prerequisite for broader development goals. A later BMJ article renewed the case, framing health information as a neglected determinant of health outcomes rather than a technical afterthought. HIFA did not invent the problem, but it has consistently tried to stop it disappearing from view. In practical terms, the organisation argues that bad or absent information can distort clinical decisions, weaken public trust, and leave patients exposed to both neglect and falsehoods.

That argument has become more urgent as telemedicine and wider forms of digital health have moved into the mainstream. The WHO says digital health should help countries strengthen health systems, including those with limited access to digital technologies, while its telemedicine guidance stresses that remote services can extend coverage and improve clinical management. More recently, the WHO and the International Telecommunication Union published guidance to make telehealth services more accessible. The implication is clear enough: remote care depends not only on connectivity and software, but also on whether people receive clear, credible and inclusive health information before, during and after care.

This is where HIFA occupies an important, if understated, niche. Many digital health debates begin with infrastructure. HIFA begins with comprehension. A patient with a smartphone but no trustworthy explanation of symptoms, treatment options or risk is not meaningfully empowered. Nor is a community health worker who can log data into a system but cannot easily access up to date clinical guidance in an appropriate language. HIFA’s multilingual health information model reflects that point. Its forums operate in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, and it has repeatedly stressed that language, health literacy and local context are central to whether information can actually improve care.

The equity dimension is hard to ignore. According to World Bank data, internet access in low and middle income countries has expanded, but it remains uneven, and digital access alone does not settle the question of who can use online health information safely and effectively. Research and policy guidance increasingly recognise that internet access can shape healthcare access and inequality, but also that digital systems can reproduce exclusion when literacy, disability access or affordability are ignored. In other words, remote care can widen gaps as easily as narrow them. HIFA’s health information equity focus matters because it addresses the human layer of this transition, not just the technical one.

The organisation’s public-interest relevance also sharpened during the Covid-19 era, when the now familiar term “infodemic” exposed how quickly bad information can travel through the same channels used to distribute care. UNICEF has described digital misinformation as a pressing public issue, while HIFA has explicitly tied its mission to protecting people from health misinformation. For remote care systems, that is not a side issue. A platform that connects patients to clinicians can still fail if surrounding online environments reward rumour, commercial manipulation or political distrust. Reliable information is part of the care pathway, not a communications add-on.

There is also a broader governance question here. HIFA is strongest when it acts as a convener, drawing attention to how evidence moves, or fails to move, between experts and the public. That role overlaps with organisations such as Cochrane, which produces trusted evidence for health decisions, Evidence Aid, which translates evidence for disasters and crises, and the International Alliance of Patients’ Organizations, which centres patient voices in policy discussions. None does exactly the same job. But together they suggest a growing civil society infrastructure around trusted health evidence, one that treats information quality as part of system resilience rather than an optional extra.

Still, there are limits to what a network such as HIFA can achieve. Information access is shaped by publishing models, government transparency, weak primary care systems, commercial platform incentives and chronic underinvestment in public-interest knowledge. HIFA itself has acknowledged that progress is constrained by limited resources and by the lack of political and financial commitment to reliable healthcare information as a global priority. That is a structural problem. The value of good information is widely praised, but the institutions that produce, adapt, translate and circulate it often remain fragile.

Yet this is precisely why the organisation deserves attention. HIFA is not offering a technological fix for remote care. It is making a more uncomfortable point, that many health reforms rest on shaky foundations when they overlook whether people can obtain and trust the information that guides decisions. That links directly to SDG 3 (good health and well-being), because stronger services alone do not guarantee better outcomes if the knowledge needed to use them remains inaccessible or distorted. It also touches SDG 10 (reduced inequalities), given the way information gaps map onto language, income, geography and disability. In journalistic terms, the significance of HIFA lies less in organisational scale than in the precision of its diagnosis. Health systems do not become fair simply because they go digital. They become fair when information, as well as care, is treated as a public good.

Further information:

·       HIFA, the central organisation in this article, campaigns for universal access to reliable healthcare information and convenes a large international network around that goal. https://www.hifa.org/

·       Cochrane, a global non-profit network producing trusted health evidence used by clinicians, patients and policymakers. https://www.cochrane.org/

·       Evidence Aid, relevant because it focuses on making the best available evidence usable in disasters and humanitarian crises, where information failures can be especially damaging. https://evidenceaid.org/

·       International Alliance of Patients' Organizations, they represents patient groups internationally and highlights why trustworthy information must be meaningful to patients, not only experts. https://www.iapo.org.uk/