About Us

The Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) is a public private initiative that has collaboratively evolved through consultations with multiple constituencies including Indian and International academia, state and central governments, multi & bi-lateral agencies and civil society groups. PHFI is a response to redress the limited institutional capacity in India for strengthening training, research and policy development in the area of Public Health. Structured as an independent foundation, PHFI adopts a broad, integrated approach to public health, tailoring its endeavors to Indian conditions and bearing relevance to the countries facing similar challenges and concerns. The PHFI focuses on broad dimensions of public health that encompass promotive, preventive and therapeutic services, many of which are frequently lost in policy planning as well as in popular understanding. 14th Prime Minister of India launched launched PHFI on March 28, 2006 at New Delhi with a vision to strengthen India's public health institutional and systems capability and provide knowledge to achieve better health outcomes for all. PHFI recognizes the fact that meeting the shortfall of health professionals is imperative to a sustained and holistic response to the public health concerns in the country which in turn requires health care to be addressed not only from the scientific perspective of what works, but also from the social perspective of, who needs it the most.

PHFI has established a Centre of Digital Health that will facilitate harmonisation of research initiatives that are currently being undertaken and advance new and potentially transformational initiatives across the PHFI universe. The unit explores applications of digital health technology in public health, and lead the nation’s effort in transforming healthcare.
It aims to bring together players in the public and private sector as well as civil society organizations. PHFI’s evidence based, insightful research that is regional in perspective and global in outlook, combined with committed professionals of multi-disciplinary expertise, is the backbone of this centre. It is an intersection between PHFI’s research, training and knowledge of public health and the network of partners who are leaders in technology. Through this we intend to expand, upscale and implement some of the existing health technology tools (e.g., DSS, CADT) and systems (e.g., literacy and referral pathways, data repository systems) that have been developed at PHFI.