Global Perspectives on Digital Health

Shubs Upadhyay
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🌍 Global Perspectives on Digital Health A podcast unpacking the stories, insights, and innovation shaping health systems and underserved communities. 🎧 Listen on Apple, Spotify. Watch on YouTube

  1. Oct 6

    The future of AI in Global Health research

    What a pleasure it was to have Rohit Malpani and Peiling Yap on the show, editors of a new journal about AI in Global health.  This one is for researchers, implementers of digital and AI tools in low resource settings.  We cover: The challenges for people in the so called Global South to have a leading voice in academia. Hype and reality on AI: premiums on speed to publish and oneupmanship vs investigating what really makes things workWhy publishing things that went wrong or unexpectedly is needed even moreHow academic journals and publishing can do betterHow people in digital health and AI in healthcare should approach evidence generationThe future of academic publishing in a world increasingly short of attention, patience and deep workHow Ronny Chieng’s Harvard address can make us think critically about what we should be optimising towards.  Plus what the new RSTM AI in Global Health journal is looking for and what type of papers most excite them Links!Ronny Chieng Harvard address. Seriously, watch it. IDRC funded AI4GH work mentioned by Peiling, also published in a great special collection in npj Digial Medicine Big tech hiring philosophers articleIndustry AI research articleConversational agents are super communicative, not super intelligent article New Video series!Finally, check out a brand new Youtube video series about Tech for Global health challenges. The first one is on Tuberculosis, with the Wellcome Trust, QureAI, AI Diagnostics, Community Health Impact Coalition and Audere. If you liked this episode, share with people who would learn from it! And head over to gpodh.org and check out a few related ones. Leave us a review or send us a message.  1. Evaluation Level up with Shay Soremekun2. Implementation 101 and how to fail well with Caroline Perrin Want to sponsor a deep dive episode? Get in touch at gpodh.org

    The future of AI in Global Health research

  2. Apr 7

    Enhancing newborn care in rural Eastern Congo. How a tool built alongside nurses changed everything

    The most vulnerable moment in any human life is the first few hours. In this episode, Shubs talks with Dr. Josh Bress, pediatrician, President of Global Strategies and Medical Director of NoviGuide, a tool used nearly half a million times to help nurses in remote facilities across Africa manage critical newborn care. Josh shares his experiences and stories from Eastern Congo, why paper guidelines fail at the bedside, how configuration (not customization) is the key to scaling, what it actually looks like to delight frontline health workers, and what's kept his team going through 15 years of building at the last mile. Essential listening for anyone building for impact in global health. "I'm not going to be better than these nurses. What can I do to help these nurses do their job better?"Key takeaways Paper guidelines end up on shelves, digital care pathways get to the bedside. Josh compares paper guidelines to an atlas and Novi Guide to Google Maps. Built right, digital can adapt to what you actually have, flow with real clinical decisions, and stay available at 3am.Configuration, not customisation, is how you scale. Everyone told Josh he'd have to rebuild NoviGuide for every country. He didn't. Clinical guidelines differ in predictable ways. The real variation is at the site level: what drugs, equipment, and diagnostics are available. Build for that and you can scale without starting from scratch.Delight your end user. Nurses turned NoviGuide into a verb. They trained others with more passion than Josh's own team could. They hit the feedback button asking for more. Treat frontline health workers as true customers, not passive recipients.Local leadership is the engine of scale. Josh has personally met fewer than a dozen of NoviGuide's users across nearly half a million uses. Scale happened because local leaders like Dr. Nakakeeto in Uganda took ownership and made the tool their own.This is practical, heartfelt and full of so much wisdom for people building, developing policy or funding tech solutions for healthcare in low resource settings.  About JoshuaDr. Joshua Bress is a pediatrician and leads the nonprofit Global Strategies, where he serves as the medical director of the NoviGuide clinical decision support platform. He completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, attended medical school at Vanderbilt University, and then completed his pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco. After residency, he moved to eastern Congo, living and working in the city of Goma from 2011 to 2012. That experience, and the challenges of sustaining high-quality care in resource-limited settings, led him to focus on clinical decision support. Today, he works with a multidisciplinary team to develop and scale NoviGuide, a point-of-care platform used by nurses and clinicians to deliver guideline-based care for newborns and children, helping bridge the gap between training, guidelines, and real-world clinical practice.​ (00:00) - Introduction to Global Health and Neonatology (05:17) - The Unique Challenges of Newborn Care (07:33) - Experiences in Eastern Congo (10:21) - The Role of Nurses in Neonatal Care (12:50) - Identifying Gaps in Neonatal Care (15:19) - Developing the Novi Guide (18:09) - Adapting Guidelines for Local Contexts (20:50) - User-Centric Design in Healthcare Technology (23:41) - Scaling the Novi Guide Across Regions (26:32) - The Importance of Local Adaptation (29:02) - Delighting Users with Effective Solutions (37:50) - Scaling Challenges and Insights (40:17) - The Importance of Local Leadership (43:05) - Customization vs. Configuration in Digital Tools (45:59) - Managing Complexity in Healthcare Applications (48:55) - The Role of Feedback in Product Development (51:34) - Balancing Trust and Scale in Healthcare (54:29) - Lessons from a leader (01:02:25) - What Policymakers and Funders can do better (01:07:52) - This is a team sport

    Enhancing newborn care in rural Eastern Congo. How a tool built alongside nurses changed everything

  3. Mar 19

    How to develop AI that addresses health inequities

    Joe Alderman has this great ability to break down complex things into a good hearty discussion. Joe is an Anaesthetist by night and AI academic by day. His insights on what it takes to deploy and monitor AI in healthcare with a lens on not leaving people behind are relevant wherever in the world you are. We discussed some of the nuance and challenges around AI in healthcare, as well as some anti patterns  If you are a data or AI scientist, or shipping AI products, what can you do starting tomorrow to begin thinking more proactively about underserved communities or ensure you’re not creating unintended harm to vulnerable groups. Stuff the industry is not doing great on: We’re starting with the dataset or the technology we happen to have, instead of working backwards from what we are fundamentally trying to achieve in the world. (If I nodded any more at this point my head would have rolled off)A revisit on where things are with the Standing Together initiative, something Xiao Liu talked about in the very first episode.  In the UK, there are big areas where life expectancy is falling. Health inequalities are rising. Our datasets have bias. It’s tempting to fall into the narrative that this is a tech deficiency problem. It is not. It is a whole society problem and we’re not going to solve it with JUST tech. If govts, regulators and health systems find it challenging to be on top of the safety issues with LLMs, how are lay people going to? Joe covers how the upcoming work of the Healthcare Chatbot User Guide can help people navigate some of the key things they need to consider We cover a LOT in this 1 hour discussion, including how patients and clinicians can think more critically about which tasks to best use Gen AI with, and how to think about safety and liability.  This one is for AI and data scientists, product folk, developers and clinicians. Get it on your weekend playlist Links:MHRA’s National Commission into the Regulation of AI in Healthcare: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/national-commission-into-the-regulation-of-ai-in-healthcare Building The Health Chatbot Users’ Guide: https://healthchatbotguide.org/ The NHS Fellowship in Clinical AI: https://www.nhsfellowship.ai/ NHS Digital Clinical Safety Training: https://digital.nhs.uk/services/clinical-safety/clinical-risk-management-training Chapters00:00 Introduction and Joe's work06:36 The Role of AI in Patient Care07:52 Navigating AI Risks and Benefits18:13 Addressing Health Data Poverty24:28 Building Responsible AI Systems30:18 Exploring Large Language Models in Healthcare34:05 Addressing Bias and Representativeness in AI Models40:04 Navigating Regulatory Challenges for AI Technologies40:51 Empowering Patients in the Age of AI44:32 Public Perception and Trust in Digital Health47:00 Identifying Real Problems in Healthcare Technology52:00 The Future of AI in Healthcare55:29 Joe's insights for those building in low resource settings56:57 A book recommendation and critical thinking for patients and clinicians About Joe Joe is an NHS anaesthetist in the UK and an NIHR clinical lecturer (assistant professor) in AI and digital health at the University of Birmingham, UK.  He leads mixed-methods research and policy engagement to help get the most from AI in healthcare - including the STANDING Together initiative. He recently founded an international initiative to build ‘The Health Chatbot Users’ Guide’.

    How to develop AI that addresses health inequities

  4. Feb 17

    Digital innovation in humanitarian settings

    How do global organizations built to respond and aid in conflict respond to digital transformation? The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) : you’re probably familiar with the work that happens here : emergencies, conflict zones, disasters, working at the last mile in difficult circumstances. How does an organization like even begin to approach “tech innovation” There’s clearly lots of need. What do you prioritize when everyone needs improvements now?  PLUS How do you adapt off the shelf LLM models for remote humanitarian contexts? Javier Elkin spent 3 years as Head of Digital Health at ICRC. He set the unit up from scratch. Coming in at a time, post COVID, the opportunities for tech addressing unmet need proliferated. And in parallel trying to create stability with multiple financial crises and organizational challenges.   If you’re in digital health and wrestling with the global scale and local trust and value tradeoffs, have a listen to how an actual global organization dealt with it.  Some standouts for me from our convo: We spoke about context : correctness vs being useful If you ask a LLM : What do I do for this gunshot or limb trauma, it might be reasonable to say that a response like : call emergency services is universally correct.  But in a conflict zone or very rural setting, that has zero value compared to “take two pieces of wood to act as a splint”, or try X to stem blood loss. How did the ICRC digital team work (with partners at EPFL) on their validation and evaluation to get better at these aspects? Your LLM might be technically, and even medically correct, but completely useless on the ground for someone.  Want to find out more about the MOOVE initiative? Take me there 2. Prioritization based on outcomes, constraints, feasibility Link to assessment framework 3. We get some proper concrete examples that cover: How they used tech to aid a handover to a local healthcare system in Western Nigeria after years of being there. How they used an open source tool already being used in the field to help spin up digital workflow solutions FASTHow they partnered with EPFL to develop testing, validation and evaluation pipelines for LLM decision support specific and relevant for conflict settings (some absolute gold in here) We also get Javier’s honest reflections about the humanitarian sector in general : how the financial crises (esp the last year with huge funding challenges) have manifested, what next for the humanitarian sector and what could be done differently.  Packed with lessons this one, do not miss it. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Digital Health and Javier's Journey07:55 Approach to creating a digital health unit from scratch13:53 Prioritization Framework at the digital health22:32 Innovative Solutions in Humanitarian Health29:21 Strategic Handover and Local Ownership35:20 Integrating Digital Health in Conflict Zones41:21 Evaluating AI in Humanitarian Settings53:26 Reflections on Trust and the Humanitarian Sector

    Digital innovation in humanitarian settings

  5. Jan 28

    USAID cuts, women's health and leading the right way

    At the end of last year I got the chance to record the first episode of the show in an actual studio. Still a lot to learn about this versus virtually, but Patty Mecheal was a gracious and very awesome guest.  Patty, CEO of healthenabled brings nearly three decades of mHealth and digital health experience into this discussion we recorded during the Global Digital Health Forum in Nairobi in December 2025.   After a tumultuous year of policy shifts with USAID funding, WHO shifts and the cascading challenges globally, our conversation examines how we got here and where we need to go when ethics and inclusivity are politically sidelined. What we cover: The state of 2025 - USAID cuts and their ripple effects on healthcare and digital health in underserved communitiesLessons from the 1990s to now - what patterns keep repeating, and what fundamental mistakes we're still makingWomen as decision-makers AND consumers - why this isn't just the "right thing to do" (though it is), but represents massive unmet market opportunityValue and context in evaluation - how to actually assess digital health and AI tools in ways that matterLeadership with values - Patty's honest reflections on what she's learned and gotten wrongBuilding responsibly when the incentives don't reward it - what does ethical implementation look like now? This episode is for you if you: Build digital health or AI solutionsMake policy or funding decisionsResearch or evaluate health interventionsAre working on impact in women’s health Unfiltered, real insights from someone who's seen it all.  Chapters and Timestamps 00:00 Introduction to Global Perspectives on Digital Health 01:24 Reflections on the Global Digital Forum 04:03 Patti's Journey and Background 08:20 Aha Moments in Public Health 11:46 The Importance of Data in Health Interventions 16:01 Learning from low resource settings 21:55 Building Trust in Digital Health Solutions 24:50 Balancing Scalability and Trust 30:22 The Role of Compassion in Healthcare 40:53 The Theory of Change in Digital Health 46:13 Bootstrapping Innovations in Digital Health 52:49 Compassionate Leadership and Ethical Practices 57:08 The Role of Women in Health and Technology About Patty: Dr. Patricia (Patty) Mechael is a global digital health leader, speaker, and award-winning author with nearly 30 years of experience shaping equity-centered health and technology initiatives across more than 45 countries. She is Co-Founder and CEO of health.enabled, where she leads the Global Digital Health Monitor and Digital Health and AI Strategy efforts with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, WHO, UNICEF, and others. She is also a Senior Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she serves as the Co-Principal Investigator for the Gates Foundation’s Digital Health Exemplars and where she also teaches a course on Gender-intentional Digital Health. Known for translating complex ideas into human, actionable insights, Patty writes and speaks widely on responsible AI, gender equity, and the future of work and health—bringing a grounded, compassion-driven leadership lens shaped by both evidence and lived experience.

    USAID cuts, women's health and leading the right way

  6. Jan 14

    Why displaced people need a digital identitiy

    I sat down to talk to Nadia Kadhim, co-founder of Naq about digital identity and healthcare for displaced people.  Nadia’s father was a refugee, and we hear about her journey into human rights law and eventually into data security and compliance.  We cover: That digital identity for displaced people is messed up. How this creates very real barriers to care (with examples)How healthcare systems aren’t set up for real access or meaningful care for refugeesCan we even do anything about this when political agenda in many places cares less and less about this?Why, even so, we should wake up - the likelihood of us being displaced due to conflict or climate change is going up. How would we want to be cared for?This is an everybody problem, which is part of why it’s so hard to solve.  If you’re into policy, data security, health and digital for displaced people, or building tools that could be being used by refugees, you’ll gain a lot from spending less than an hour on this topic.  If you care about this topic you should also listen to the episode with Aral Surmeli. Inspiring in equal measure. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Digital Health and Human Rights07:19 Data, Identity, and Access to Healthcare10:39 Challenges Faced by Refugees in Healthcare15:21 Real-Life Stories of Refugees and Healthcare Access20:32 Why no solution yet?23:01 The Future of Healthcare for Displaced People30:29 The Role of Funding and Multi-Stakeholder Approaches31:59 Data and Human Lives: The Health Data Poverty Problem34:22 Ethics and Regulatory Compliance in Digital Health38:22 Ownership and Security of Health Data43:13 Nadia's Recommendations for Policy Makers and Digital Health Founders ---- Global Perspectives on digital health shares the insights of innovators, donors, policy makers and researchers on what it takes to create impact at the last mile with digital health and AI in underserved communities around the world through audio and video.  We’re telling the underreported stories of impact that the digital health industry needs to pay more attention to.  There’s a growing back catalogue of over 20 engaging, inspiring and real conversations about the places in the world where the biggest challenges lie, but where the deepest impact in healthcare is happening. Tune in on gpodh.org Subscribing and sharing really helps get this to the noggins of people who care about this topic. If you found this useful, please leave us a comment and some review stars.

    Why displaced people need a digital identitiy

  7. 11/05/2025

    Evaluation level up : Measuring what matters

    🎯 Evaluation! A make or break thing in the digital health.  I sat down with Dr Shay Soremekun from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to talk about the very hot topic of evidence generation and evaluation.  Everyone's talking about LLM evals, technical performance, benchmarking.  But ultimately people care about impact. Yet impact is rarely a neat, linear path to a yes/no answer. Anyone who's actually implemented something in the field knows about all the other contributing factors, the daily challenges and how hard it is to move the needle on big clinical outcomes with robust clinical evaluation. To understand why it improved care, if it did, was as important, if not more important, than understanding that it did. Because that will help us to understand how we need to potentially modify or adapt the intervention either in the same place or in future places to be able to achieve the same success.  🌟 Who will benefit from listening to this episode? Digital health companies : Founders, data scientists, AI/ML scientists, PMs, designers, clinical evaluation/study teams, cliniciansFunders : donors, investorsGlobal and public health professionalsImplementersResearchersRegulators Shay explains the use of Program Theory and Logic models to visually connect your intervention, all the intermediate steps (not just technology, but people and change) to outputs, outcomes and long term impact.  Making space to observe other levers in the system you didn't initially anticipate.  The work that Shay and her team have done with The Malaria Consortium and LSTM's Centre for Evaluation looking at a digital health tool for community health workers in villages and facilities showed this perfectly. Because they were intentional about observing the whole system, they discovered other factors contributing to impact and could redirect efforts accordingly. In this age of tightening budgets, and pressure to show clean shiny KPIs, how do you make room to observe these things?  We also discussed decolonizing evaluation: capturing what's locally valuable, not just paradigms of success developed in comfortable offices and ivory towers. So many learnings here for understanding good co-design, implementation, and how to measure what matters. Chapters00:00 Intro04:15 Mozambique digital health tool for CHWs : context14:19 Tsking a system lens approach16:25 Measuring What Matters in Health Interventions23:02 Resourcefulness in Low-Resource Settings27:25 Challenges and Successes in Digital Interventions29:34 Proactive Measurement and Adaptation31:20 Scaling Up Successful Interventions32:59 Revolutionizing Evaluation Practices39:38 Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge in Evaluations44:57 Key Recommendations for Measuring What Matters  💡 Keep learning!If you found this episode helpful listen to:Episode 15 : Implementation 101 and how to Fail well with Caroline Perrin Episode 12 : Health First, Innovation second, with Smisha AggarwalEpisode 5 : What is the right approach for regulation and evaluation of digital health technologies? I have also written a Substack article summarising what I learned from this episode. Check it out for easy reference to the concepts outlined. Found it useful? Know someone who is struggling with this very thing? Share and keep raising the profile of people impacting underserved community globally. References and links to things we spoke aboutinSCALE papers: https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pdig.0000235 https://journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pdig.0000217   Link for upSCALE  (roll-out of project): https://www.malariaconsortium.org/projects/upscale https://www.malariaconsortium.org/resources/integrating-upscale-into-the-ministry-of-health  Study protocol for Uganda and Mozambique:https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-015-0657-6  Links to Chilisa Bagele – one of the most foremost voices on decolonial evaluation methodology so a good start for anyone interested (talk at LSHTM): https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/events/decoloniality-and-indigenous-methods-global-health-evaluation-professor-bagele Centre for Evaluation Website  https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-evaluation   About Dr Shay SoremekunDr Shay Soremekun is an epidemiologist and co-deputy Director of the Centre for Evaluation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research in child and adolescent health and development covers trials of low-cost disease prevention programmes, and identification of risk factors and mitigation strategies for poor developmental and economic outcomes in this group. She is a member of the UK Government Evaluation and Trial Advice Panel (ETAP), and sits on the steering committee for the John Snow Society. She lectures at postgraduate level on topics of evaluation, epidemiology and public health, and has developed and organises an MSc module in Study Design.   LSHTM page: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/people/soremekun.shay

    Evaluation level up : Measuring what matters

  8. 10/07/2025

    Social impact in a time of scarcity, and the power of community

    🚨 Nick Martin, social impact titan, one of the biggest voices out there in this space with a huge following and community, helping connect people to jobs, funding and much more.  Founder and CEO of TechChange, working with funders, government and tech, and giving people the skills they need to create real impact.  We’ve talked a lot about the impacts of the USAID funding cuts on this podcast. Nick, who has worked shares his view on the impact on grantees, humans and more. We cover: How do we deal with this new world order, and this new scarcity?What have we learned about the things that went well with USAID, and what could be better in the future?How do people affected think about their careers?How do organizations  adapt their vision, strategy and tactics in a world of scarcity, and be sustainable through this perma-uncertainty.  We also talked about the upcoming Global Digital Health Forum, a gathering that has been going strong for years, and why this year feels particularly important to bring people in global and digital health together. The next one at the time of recording is 3-5 December 2025, online and in Nairobi in person. If you're into Global Digital Helath and underserved communities, this is a great gathering to attend. If you are working in this space, dealing with the uncertainty, either as an organization or an individual, then this podcast is for you.  Nick shares some of the wisdom and insights he has gained over the years, and why community across borders is such an integral part of how we shape what global digital health looks like in the next 10 years.  Check it out - share with others working in the space. Leave us a comment or review - it really helps us reach more people.  00:00 Intro : Nick's story03:58 USAID cuts. Before, during, after : reflections from the development sector21:13 Career transition advice24:14 Funders need to step up more, but it's not that simple26:34 TechChange origins28:22 The Global Digital Health Forum : bringing people together34:30 Fail festivals and creating the space to talk about failure38:56 Wisdom corner : Nick's top tips Liked this episode? What to listen to next:- Episode 15: Implementation 101 and how to fail well- Episode 16 : How the WHO is evolving What to read next:Check out my Substack : Can Global Health and Venture Capital Get Along? About Nick Nick Martin is the Founder and CEO of TechChange, a social enterprise that has become a leading provider of digital health training and convening solutions worldwide. Under his leadership, TechChange has trained thousands of Ministry of Health officials in more than 90 countries through flagship programs such as Digital Health: Planning National Systems, developed in partnership with USAID, WHO, and Digital Square. He also leads the Global Digital Health Forum, the premier annual gathering for policymakers, donors, researchers, and implementers working at the intersection of technology and health. With two decades of experience in global development and public health, Nick has built partnerships with organizations including USAID, UNICEF, WHO, and the Gates Foundation. His work has been featured in outlets such as The Economist, Forbes, The New York Times, and Fast Company, highlighting his role in advancing digital health and social impact through technology.

    Social impact in a time of scarcity, and the power of community
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🌍 Global Perspectives on Digital Health A podcast unpacking the stories, insights, and innovation shaping health systems and underserved communities. 🎧 Listen on Apple, Spotify. Watch on YouTube

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