The HIFA vision is: "A world where every person and every health worker will have access to the healthcare information they need to protect their own health and the health of others". HIFA addresses the information needs of citizens as well as health workers and health policymakers, recognising the importance of citizens, parents and children as providers of care, especially in low-resource settings where health workers may be absent or hard to reach. The HIFA community interacts on five discussion forums: HIFA, CHIFA, HIFA-Portuguese, HIFA-French, and HIFA-Zambia.
CHIFA, formerly known as CHILD2015, focuses on child health and rights and has more than 3500 global child health professionals. CHIFA is administered jointly by Global Healthcare Information Network, International Child Health Group, and International Society for Social Paediatrics and Child Health.
HIFA-French is a collaboration between the World Health Organization and Global Healthcare Information Network. The forum was originally called HIFA-EVIPNet-French and had a focus on the information needs of policy makers for health in francophone Africa, in association with the Evidence-Informed Policy Network at the World Health Organization. In 2015, the forum expanded its remit to become HIFA-French, in association with the Health Service Delivery and Patient Safety department of WHO.
In November 2009, the Global Healthcare Information Network and ePORTUGUESe launched a Portuguese version of HIFA which has more than 2000 members in the eight Portuguese-speaking countries.
In May 2011, HIFA-Zambia was launched in collaboration with the Zambia UK Health Workforce Alliance.
Recognition
In June 2010, the Positive Practice Environments Campaign, hosted at the International Council of Nurses in Geneva, officially incorporated the HIFA2015 Fact Sheet: Meeting the information needs of health professionals into their campaign materials to empower health workers worldwide to deliver evidence-informed health services to the global population. In May 2011, the British Medical Association hosted the first international HIFA Conference. Virginia Barbour, Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Medicine, said, "It is a shameful fact that in 2011 people are still dying because their healthcare workers don’t have access to the information they need." From January to September 2011, HIFA underwent an external evaluation funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which concluded: “HIFA2015 achieves an extraordinary level of activity on minimal resources from which many people around the world benefit". In the summer of 2012, the European Association of Science Editors formally became a new HIFA Supporting Organization. EASE supports the global initiative by advising authors to make abstracts of their papers highly informative, reliable, and easily understandable.
