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BIREME/PAHO/WHO has maintained a close institutional relationship with Hospital São Paulo/ Associação Paulista para Desenvolvimento da Medicina (São Paulo Association for the Development of Medicine) (HSP/SPDM) for over 20 years. The existing service contract between the parties aims to maintain national personnel assigned to both BIREME/PAHO/WHO and PAHO/Brazil in Brasilia, thus constituting an important workforce in the field of health information science for Brazil and for the Latin America and Caribbean Region.

Expansion, strengthening, and training actions in Brazil and Latin America are on the agenda of the Reference Network – RefNet in 2021. The Network aims to promote cooperation between VHL librarians, universities, research centers, hospitals, and health organizations, through the development of search strategies that can be reused, shared, and adapted to the health context, and that have the VHL Search Strategy Repository as an information source.

Based on the Disease Elimination Initiative: A Policy for an Integrated and Sustainable Approach to Communicable Diseases in the Americas approved by PAHO/WHO at its 57th Directing Council, BIREME and the PAHO Department of Communicable Diseases and Environmental Determinants of Health (CDE/PAHO/WHO) developed educational projects for the elaboration of distance education courses with a focus on prevention, surveillance, and control of neglected diseases.

To mark World Cancer Day 2021, the Cancer Prevention and Control VHL – the result of a technical cooperation project between PAHO Brazil through BIREME and INCA – provides researchers, health professionals, and society with a series of innovative products and services that seek to disseminate relevant information and strengthen the creation of networks for information management in the area of cancer prevention and control.

BIREME, as a specialized center of the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization, closed out 2020 with multiple important successes and challenges, which were continuously supported by its network of collaborating institutions and a team that works seriously, committedly, and that always transforms obstacles into opportunities. The BIREME management team made their work plans for the development and institutional strengthening of BIREME, which they shared in the early days of the new year.

PAHO/WHO operates in the countries of the Region through technical cooperation programs and projects that formalize and operationalize the dissemination of information, the sharing of experiences, and guarantee the transparency and control of resource management and accountability among all those involved. Through Cooperation Terms (CT) with the Organization’s Country Offices, BIREME develops and improves products and services to improve the quality of production, access, and publication of information and scientific and technical health evidence for all countries in the Latin American and the Caribbean Region. Learn more about the CTs with PAHO/WHO in Brazil.

El Salvador, one of the countries that has been a member of the BIREME Advisory Committee (2018-2020), maintains close technical cooperation ties with BIREME, which made possible the development of various products and services in health information, like the country’s Virtual Health Library and the e-BlueInfo application, as well as strengthen the network of Cooperating Centers that contribute content to the LILACS database.

BIREME maintains a long-standing technical cooperation relationship with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), which has enabled the development of numerous events, products, and projects in information and knowledge management. This partnership is present in the daily operations of the institutions, in activities of technological and methodological support provided by BIREME for the collection of instances of the Virtual Health Library managed by the Foundation. In 2020, BIREME and Fiocruz agreed on a project proposal in the area of information and scientific evidence in health and open science.

The process of evaluation and selection of Brazil’s journals for the LILACS database is carried out annually, an activity in the context of TC93 with the Ministry of Health, and relies on the performance of an ad-hoc Evaluation Committee that constitutes the LILACS Committee since 2009 and that counts on eight specialists from areas that integrate the health sciences. This committee met last December 18^th, at the XXI Meeting of the LILACS Brazil Journal Evaluation and Selection Committee, to carry out the last stage of the journal selection process for the LILACS database, which started in August 2020

BIREME’s new institutional website in the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) system was inaugurated in October 2020, at the same web address. The migration of the platform to a new online content management system – Drupal – was determined by the PAHO/WHO ITS Department for a number of technical and economic reasons. The resulting interfaces in Spanish, Portuguese and English are much more secure, dynamic, and flexible, and allow one to produce visually more attractive and accessible resources, in addition to improving the search engines.