In global healthcare construction, there exists a striking gap: there is almost no formally documented “best practices” open-source literature on infrastructure and facilities development and management for health systems strengthening in settings of poverty.

Although this know-do gap is profound, one hopeful hypothesis is that the gaps in funding and research can be bridged through the generation and dissemination of new knowledge produced by the careful documentation and analysis of recent experience. Build Health International is in a unique position to document and summarize its own experience in building some of the most important health equity infrastructure projects oriented towards impoverished populations in recent history. The remarkable work of constructing University Hospital in Mirebalais, rebuilding clinical facilities in post-Ebola Sierra Leone, and other large-scale infrastructure development projects in similarly challenging settings has uniquely positioned Build Health International to contribute to a new literature and practice of global health equity infrastructure development.

Build Health International has accumulated knowledge through doing—diving headfirst into the profoundly messy, incredibly complex, and mostly uncharted domain of global health construction and infrastructure development. Now is the time to bridge the know-do gap, and to constitute a new and growing domain of pro-poor health care infrastructure scholarship and action as it relates to health systems strengthening and universal health coverage.

We are embarking on a research initiative that systematically gathers and summarizes Build Health International’s experience in design, construction, and maintenance of several large, high-quality, boundary-pushing health infrastructure projects around the world.

The resulting products will be technical field manuals detailing best practices on how to construction healthcare facilities in resource-constrained settings. These open-source technical publications that can be disseminated and utilized by practitioners of construction (builders, architects, foremen, engineers, etc.) in designing the technical specifications for healthcare facilities and supporting systems.

Build Health International has rich experience, expansive data, and growing knowledge about the challenges, complexities, and opportunities within each of these categories of inquiry. By summarizing and analyzing the lessons learned from BHI’s experience, we hope that this research can catalyze a much broader discussion and newly constituted literature about global health equity-oriented infrastructure development and construction. The know-do gap is bridgeable.