[9][10] Founding board members included Chair Julio Frenk, Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health; Harvey Fineberg, President of the Institute of Medicine; Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway; Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Minister of Health for Ethiopia; K. Srinath Reddy, President of the Public Health Foundation of India; Tomris Turmen, President of the International Children's Center and Head of the Department of Pediatrics/Newborn Medicine at the University of Ankara Medical School in Ankara, Turkey; Lincoln Chen, President of the China Medical Board; Jane Halton, who has served as Secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing in Australia, as well as the Department of Finance; and David Roux, Co-Chief Executive of Silver Lake Partners.

[11] IHME's current board members[12] are Frenk; Fineberg; Chen; Halton; and Roux, in addition to Stephen J. Cucchiaro, Chief Investment Officer of Windhaven Investment Management; Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England; and John W. Stanton, managing director of Trilogy Partnership.

But according to the IHME, this analysis that the institute find the estimated number of excess deaths due to COVID-19 pandemic, started from Wednesday, January 1, 2020 to Friday, December 31, 2021, has reaching 18.3 million people with nearly three times higher over that period.

[18] This estimated report of 18.3 million COVID-19 excess deaths globally is a combination of direct measurement, as well as statistical model prediction in places with less than ideal data systems.

[30] IHME has also collaborated on country-level research projects, including a partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to help create a health surveillance system to track disease trends and inform policy.

[31] The GBD enterprise produced estimates in 21 regions around the world for disability-adjusted life years by age and sex for the past two decades.

To illustrate the findings, IHME released a suite of interactive data visualizations, which are available to the public.The aim is to allow policymakers and other decision-makers to "compare the effects of different diseases – such as cancer versus depression – that kill people prematurely and cause ill health," to show disease trends over time, and to inform policy, IHME states on its website.

"[32] The UK and China are among the countries working with IHME to generate subnational burden of disease estimates at the county and province levels.

[citation needed] In January 2014, IHME began releasing updates to the work, called the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) Study 2013.

[32][36] Igor Rudan and Kit Yee Chan[37] note that IHME "struggled to generate support, legitimacy, and acceptance for their findings" after publishing the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, due to concerns of lack of transparency, as well as the existence of parallel estimates of disease burden from WHO; but argue that the emergence of IHME introduced competition to the field of global health metrics, which was previously a field where WHO maintained a monopoly: "The GBD initiative has emerged as a well-organised and rapidly growing collaboration that is now seriously challenging WHO's role in generating global health estimates".

[15][37] The Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 expanded collaboration and increased transparency but "[fell] short of allowing full independent replication of all results".

A team of demographers, statisticians, economists, and other experts are studying how to improve the allocation of resources among interventions, technologies, hospitals, and other service delivery platforms.

For example, a 2010 report showed improving girls' education in poor countries is the most effective way to reduce child mortality,[39] which was a surprise for some people.

The work includes in-depth facility surveys and inventories across a range of service delivery platforms; additional data is collected in countries with high HIV/AIDS burdens through exit interviews and chart extraction.

[citation needed] IHME conducts American research, including estimates of mortality, life expectancy, risk factors, health disparities, and disease prevalence.

IHME has compiled national and local health trends and integrated multiple data sources to monitor disparities in chronic diseases.

[citation needed] First Lady Michelle Obama cited the research in her campaign to improve Americans' diets and increase their level of physical activity.

[47] A paper published in the journal Population Health Metrics in June 2011 showed that life expectancy was rising in some poorer US counties – especially in the South[48] – a surprising result which was widely discussed.

[50] In 2020, IHME published its model projecting deaths from COVID-19 pandemic in America,[16][17] which was described as widely influential,[51][52][53] and informed guidelines developed by then-President Trump's administration.

[55][56][57] IHME released two major updates to its model in April and June 2020 to improve its accuracy and reflect different scenarios of social distancing and mask usage.