INDIANAPOLIS — An Indiana University-led global health program developed in Kenya is expanding to help improve health in new locations in Ghana and Mexico.
Over the past 30 years, the collaboration initiated between the IU School of Medicine in Indiana and Moi University School of Medicine and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya has grown into a successful global health partnership that has played an important role in confronting the HIV epidemic, financial and other social determinants of health, infrastructure needs, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The partnership, now known as the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare, or AMPATH, will launch two new sites in Puebla, Mexico, and Tamale, Ghana, based on the success of the collaborative model that IU helped develop over the past three decades in Kenya.
The newly expanded AMPATH Global network builds long-term partnerships between a consortium of more than a dozen universities and academic health centers around the world and their colleagues in low- and middle-income countries.
“AMPATH’s mission is to improve the health of people in underserved communities by working in partnership with academic health centers, ministries of health and others to build public-sector health systems and promote well-being,” said Dr. Adrian Gardner, executive director of the AMPATH Consortium of academic health centers and associate dean for global health at the IU School of Medicine. “AMPATH leads with care by delivering and sustaining effective health care services in a way that also supports training and research to improve health.
“The expansion of the AMPATH model speaks to the positive and enduring impact of our faculty and students’ work both in Kenya and North America.”
“AMPATH has provided an opportunity for both Kenyans and North Americans to improve care and deliver training and research opportunities that are mutually beneficial to all members of the partnership, as well as the populations we serve,” said Dr. Paul Ayuo, AMPATH replication ambassador from Moi University. “We look forward with great anticipation to building those same benefits with our colleagues in Ghana and Mexico.”
With the addition of the new partner sites, IU will serve as secretariat for the AMPATH Global network, providing administrative and regulatory support; facilitating and coordinating the exchange of ideas and personnel among all participating institutions; and taking a lead role in monitoring and evaluating AMPATH as a whole.
AMPATH Consortium members New York University Grossman School of Medicine and Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin represent the AMPATH Consortium in the new partnerships in Ghana and Mexico, respectively. The Ghana site will be hosted by the University for Development Studies and Tamale Teaching Hospital. In Mexico, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla Faculty of Medicine is the host academic health center working with the Ministry of Health of the State of Puebla.
Other current members of the AMPATH Consortium are Brown University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Purdue University, Stanford University, University of Alberta, University of California San Francisco, University of Toronto, Linköping University and Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine.
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, Eli Lilly and Co. and the Eli Lilly and Co. Foundation have provided more than $10 million in support for the new partner sites and IU’s role as secretariat.
